It’s not lost on Maren Ward that she’s the executive director of a theater company focused on the stories of unhoused people, and she’s also acting in a play performing the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, who famously tells visitors requesting alms for the poor: “Are there no prisons?”
Ward has been a part of zAmya Theater Company since its very beginnings 20 years ago. Founded by Lecia Grossman, who dreamed up the idea of using theater to address homelessness, Ward got involved with the group with her collaborator, Josef Evans, whom she’d also worked with at Bedlam Theatre.
With casts made of both people who have experienced homeless and housing insecurity and other collaborating artists, the company uses a community-based theater model. “For a long time, it was a project that I was working on in the midst of everything else I was doing, and then it just started to kind of grow and become a bigger thing,” Ward said.
Through the years, the organization has been a consistent place for people who have experienced homelessness to find community and connection. As the increase of encampments in recent years has shifted the public conversation around homelessness, Ward says some of those conversations have shown up in zAmya’s work.
“At the same time, I feel like zAmya’s world is a little bit more like in the shelters and more as a place for people who’ve been through that experience, and who are now in housing and trying to stay in communities,” she said. “I think what zAmya is trying to do is be a place where people can still connect with other humans.”
Ultimately, zAmya acts as a bridge between people concerned about homelessness and wanting to hear more from people who have experienced it in order to come up with solutions, and people who have those stories to tell. “That’s why we’re still around and so relevant,” Ward said. “And busier than ever.”
zAmya’s got a lot coming up, including a 20th anniversary performance at the Minneapolis Central Library, another project with Catholic Charities Twin Cities about the legacy of the Dorothy Day Center, and a collaboration with Avivo Village and the North Loop Neighborhood Association next year.
In the midst of all that, Ward is taking time to revive the titular role of “Scrooge in Rouge,” created by Ricky Graham, Jeffery Roberson & Yvette Hargis, with original music by Jefferson Turner. Open Eye Theater produced the madcap comedy last year, and is bringing it back. It’s created in the British Music Hall style— a variety-show format of songs and acts similar to American vaudeville. The bawdy style — full of cross-dressing, sexual innuendo and hijinks — was popular in the second half of the 19th century through World War I.
Open Eye’s artistic director Joel Sass directs the production, and it stars four actors (Ward, Abilene Olson, Tom Reed, and Patrick Adkins) who play characters who are all performers employed at the British Music Hall. In the conceit of the show, the four actors are supposed to be part of a 20-person cast of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” with the majority of the cast not showing up due to illness. The audience watches as the four actors-playing-actors-playing multiple characters race through the storytelling, while performing sometimes unrelated song and dance numbers at the top and bottom of each act.
“It was super fun to do and perform last time, and so I’m just delighted to be back and doing it again,” Ward told me over the phone. “This is my Christmas party. This is my fun. I get so much joy performing. And you know, this particular role is kind of in the vein of these classic male archetypes that I just get to delight in so often at Open Eye.”
Ward told me that while her work with zAmya is very fulfilling, performing is her happy place. “The funny thing about this particular play is there’s this hilarious irony of having my job at zAmya and then getting on stage and playing Scrooge. I’m relishing playing the enemy for a minute,” she said.
The role Ward plays, who is the actor playing Scrooge, is a bit of a diva character. Loud, conceited and gregarious, it’s the kind of part Ward excels at because her stage presence is so immense. While she’s playing a female character playing a male role, she doesn’t think too much about gender in this particular play.
“Everybody is going in and out of different genders in the show,” she said. “I just think about the character that it is, the person that it is, and the energy that I’m trying to bring forth.”
I had a lot of fun seeing the show last year, and I’d recommend it as you’re putting together your holiday show plans this season. (Most of the cast is returning with the exception of newcomer Tom Reed.) There’s a lot of physical humor, quick gags, broad audacity, and non-sequitur tunes that steal the show. The play runs Friday, Nov. 29, Saturday, Nov. 30, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, Dec. 1, at 2 p.m., through Dec. 29 at Open Eye ($30). More information here.
Meanwhile, if you want to take in zAmya’s anniversary performance, it’s a selection of scenes the group has created over the last 20 years, followed by cake and lemonade. That’s Saturday, Dec. 14, at 2 p.m. at Minneapolis Central Library (free). More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].
“Each of us is put here in this time and this place to personally decide the future of humankind. Did you think the Creator would create unnecessary people in a time of such terrible danger? Know that you yourself are essential to this World.”
—Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the 19th Keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe
These are complex times. Some of us would think of them as terrifying. That is in many ways true, but Indigenous peoples who have lived here for a very long time have a different perspective, one of renewal, purification and hope in the birth of a new world. We are the people who are here now and, as our great spiritual leader Arvol Looking Horse reminds us, we are the ones who must be the voice for all.
For Indigenous peoples, this is known as the time of prophecies — the Seventh Fire, the time of a new world being born. It is a time of transition. Indeed, Indigenous peoples have seen many changes. Sometimes we are referred to as post-apocalyptic. We remember what was before and we see what is now. It is in this spirit that we recognize it is always good to be thankful.
Thanksgiving in the American way summons up too many colonists and pilgrims for most of us to stomach, but thanksgiving as an action in time and an ongoing way of life is profoundly healing.
The Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, Thanksgiving Prayer is beautiful, and often quite long, in that the prayer thanks all the beings for their part in the circle of life. That seems appropriate since we rely upon the natural world for our life. That may well surprise the world of artificial intelligence, but it is fundamentally true. We live on Mother Earth. For that we are thankful.
One translation of the thousand-year-old prayer begins:
Today we have gathered, and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people. Now our minds are one.
The prayer then addresses the great beings of this world, giving thanks for each one.
The Earth Mother
We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time. To our mother, we send greetings and thanks. Now our minds are one.
The Waters
We give thanks to all the waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength. Water is life. We know its power in many forms: waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the spirit of water. Now our minds are one.
The Fish
We turn our minds to all the fish life in the water. They were instructed to cleanse and purify the water. They also give themselves to us as food. We are grateful that we can still find pure water. So, we turn now to the fish and send our greetings and thanks.
Now our minds are one …
This prayer continues for many stanzas, and is delivered not only on Thanksgiving Day but at many feasts and gatherings because gratitude is a basic principle of life, and of sustainability. So is relationship. Thanksgiving is an action of gratitude, and that reciprocity reaffirms relationship as the core principle of life.
An Indigenous ethic often marveled at by anthropologists is Indinawaymuganidoog or “we are all related.” That’s Anishinaabemowin, my mother language. The Anishinaabe, the Haudenausaunee and other Indigenous peoples understand that humans are a part of the natural world, not separate from or in charge of it. This is the “web of life.” In an Indigenous worldview, instead of the dominion of humans we see a dominion of Mother Earth. And to her we offer gratitude.
Indigenous teachings also reaffirm reciprocity. That is, you offer thanks for what you take, you take only what you need, and you leave the rest to others. That way other relatives can also eat, and something always remains for the future.
Those teachings are pretty counter to the rights-based entitlement of this society. In practice that seems to be, “If I can get away with it, I will do it. I will take for me, and now.” That translates to: I will throw stuff in the woods. I will dump waste in the river. I will leave a big mess, just so I can get away with it. That is a really immature way, certainly the Donald Trump way.
The depth of this entitlement is continental. We are an entitled bunch. We consume a third of the world’s resources, and we throw most of it away within a year. That’s to say, a lot of us feel entitled to a cell phone, and plenty of access to getting our nails done. And a lot of folks don’t care to work more than they need to, often trying just to get by, walking away before the job is even done.
Entitlement is the opposite of gratitude. And it’s not a long-game plan. Indeed, I have a right to do many things, but I have the restraint and respect to not do those things.
In these times of crashing biodiversity, I am thankful for the dams that have gone down on the Klamath River and the return of the salmon. I am thankful for people who show kindness, compassion and love. Indeed, I am thankful every day.
November is Native American Heritage Month, sort of like the one month America is supposed to think about Native people, crammed between Halloween (which until recently would often be full of youngsters dressed as Pocahontas) and Thanksgiving. This is it, this is our month to be remembered. When writing in this time, I always try to get in as much as I can.
I’m thankful for the lands which have been returned to our people this year: the Shell Mounds in Berkeley, California, along with Indian Island in Eureka, California.
I’m thankful that the Dakota had some of their sacred land returned to them, and I’m thankful that I heard our ceremonial drums sound for the first time in 50 years in my village. I’m thankful that our language is heard and understood. And I am thankful for the corn harvests we have from our lands, ancient corn which survived so long.
And I am thankful for my mother who is still here with us, at almost 92 years of age.
Winona LaDuke
I think often of what Onondaga leader Oren Lyons tells us: “The Creator’s law is the highest law, higher than the laws of nations, states, or municipalities.”
What does that mean? He is saying that just because we have a right under man’s laws does not mean that we have that right under the Creator’s law. What better way to express the reality of climate change.
As we look at a political and industrial world that seems to have moved onto a worse track and is accelerating toward destruction, I am grateful for the Thanksgiving prayer. I am of the thought that we should be thankful daily and bring our minds together to be one as our Mother Earth is one.
This story about pipeline programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
As might be expected of someone working toward a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine, Jocelyn Ricard has impressive credentials.
There are scholarships — Knight-Hennessy and, last year, a Ford Foundation Fellowship — and publications in journals like Nature Neuroscience and The Lancet Psychiatry. Plus, Ricard has done research at Yale and Cornell; and in Chiang Mai, Thailand; Berlin; and elsewhere.
The 26-year-old’s research focuses on substance-use disorders and how inequity and disadvantage affect brain function, interest she says was spurred by seeing relatives grapple with addiction and incarceration. She credits the University of Minnesota for her entrée into the field.
Specifically, she said that the Multicultural Summer Research Opportunities Program, known as MSROP, offered a vital invitation the summer before her sophomore year. Said Ricard, “I think MSROP changed my life.”
A low-income, first-generation student from both Minneapolis and St. Paul, Ricard said the “multicultural” label was a targeted welcome to explore a path she knew nothing about. “That was one of the things that drew me to the program,” said Ricard, who is Black. As an experience specifically for students from underrepresented racial groups, she said, “it felt like people really wanted to assist” those like her who “had no prior understanding of ‘research’ and what that meant.”
Through MSROP, Ricard learned not just how to conduct research, but how to write an abstract, compose presentation posters and scientific papers, plus how to network and navigate a conference — “such important skills,” she said, that are “like a hidden curriculum.” The program also connected her to other students of similar backgrounds who shared her interests.
Today, however, MSROP is no longer. Following the June 2023 Supreme Court decision banning colleges from considering race in admissions and a wave of state laws curbing campus diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, such pipeline programs, along with race- and gender-based affinity mentoring circles and scholarships, are facing fire.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
While there is no official count of such programs, they have become common offerings on college campuses as ways to support underrepresented students. This has spurred a backlash from conservative groups arguing for “equality” — providing all students the same opportunities — over “equity,” which seeks to help those needing supports to access them. That backlash is expected to intensify with the reelection of Donald J. Trump.
The Equal Protection Project, a conservative legal group, has been particularly active in challenging services for students based on race and gender. Launched in early 2023 as an arm of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, the group boasted in its “Impact Report” that between February 2023 and September 2024, it had filed 43 complaints with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), made four “other challenges,” filed seven amicus curiae briefs, one lawsuit — and recorded 20 “wins.” The group’s “Vision: 2025” includes “continued OCR complaints” and “strategic lawsuits.”
William A. Jacobson, Cornell law professor and founder of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, said his group’s goal is “to stop discriminatory conduct.” He said that barring entry to certain groups, like white students, harms them. “We don’t accept that having racially discriminatory barriers is just no big deal or is not actually depriving, not actually harming someone,” he said.
Others disagree. Derek W. Black, professor of law at the University of South Carolina and expert in education law and policy, said that campuses that are halting or altering offerings may be doing so unnecessarily. The only thing the Supreme Court ruling struck down, he said, “was racial box-checking” in admissions. “Colleges, however, seem to be running in the opposite direction of anything that even touches or relates to race, even if it does not involve the prohibited box-checking, because they are afraid of public scrutiny or being sued,” he said.
The issue turns on the specifics of how programs frame their purpose and admit students, said Black, noting that programs cannot formally bar white students unless designed “as a remedy to past discrimination.” In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague” letter in August 2023, stating that schools could “offer or recognize programs focused on the experience of particular racial groups, including mentorship programs, fellowships, leadership trainings, and similar opportunities,” but could not exclude students based on race. Targeted programs in and of themselves were not necessarily a problem, the letter said.
Yet some campuses are not pushing back against legal challenges. After the Equal Protection Project filed a civil rights complaint in May 2023 charging that MSROP was discriminatory because it admitted only students of color, the University of Minnesota altered the program and whom it serves.
It is now “Pathways to Graduate School: Summer Research Program,” making no mention of race, gender, ethnicity nor “any specific populations of students,” although it does consider students’ experiences and “contribution to the cultural, gender, age, economic, or geographic diversity of the student body,” according to a statement from the University of Minnesota’s Office of Undergraduate Education shared by Andria Waclawski, director of public relations. The statement also said that MSROP dates to the 1980s and “was developed in part to address the underrepresentation of students of color at the graduate or professional level, which was considered a national issue.”
Some experts argue that it remains a pressing national issue.
Darnell Cole, a professor and co-director of the Center for Education, Identity and Social Justice at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, said targeted programs offer students tools “to optimally navigate post-secondary institutions,” and accomplish their own goals while serving the institution’s aim of having successful graduates and alumni. Attacking DEI programs, he said, provides “little gain” for other students while taking away from targeted groups.
“It is not really about fairness. It is not really about merit. It’s really about excluding people, and we have a long history of doing that,” said Cole.
Related: Cutting race-based scholarships blocks path to college, students say
Across higher education, Black and Hispanic students remain underrepresented in college and graduate programs, especially in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. A 2023 report by the Council of Graduate Schools found Black students “particularly underrepresented in several fields,” comprising 6.5 percent of biological and agricultural sciences graduate students, 6 percent in engineering, and just 3.8 percent in physical and earth sciences.
A 2023 report by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics found Black and Hispanic students underrepresented in STEM master’s degree programs, also noting that such students “are especially underrepresented at the doctoral level.” Hispanic students were 12 percent of Ph.D. students in science and engineering; Black students were 6.6 percent.
Research suggests that race-based support and pipeline programs do increase the entry and persistence of underrepresented students into certain fields, especially STEM.
Yet legal complaints have some campuses broadening who may apply.
At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the 2-year-old CRWN program — an abbreviation for “Creative Regal Women of kNowledge” — has a mission “to inspire undergraduate women of color.”
In May, the Equal Protection Project filed a civil rights complaint claiming the program engaged in “invidious discrimination on the basis of race, color and sex.” A video on the CRWN website features Black women attesting to the power of a gathering space for women of color, but Abby Abazorius, an MIT spokesperson, said via email that “all undergraduate students are invited to participate regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin, or gender.” The website was updated in the spring, she said, “to make that more clear.”
Even groups bringing together students and alumni for career help are facing attack. After the the Equal Protection Project in October challenged a BIPOC Alumni-Student Mentoring Program at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, the description was revised to say that while created “with BIPOC students in mind,” it “is open to mentors and mentees of all races, ethnicities, and national origins.”
Jacobson of the Equal Protection Project said he is glad programs are altering admissions criteria, but that it may not be enough. In the case of the University of Virginia, he said, it did not remove “BIPOC” from the name or program descriptor. “We’re glad that they put in language that it’s open to everybody.” But, he said, “that doesn’t solve the problem.”
Related: How did students pitch themselves to colleges after last year’s affirmative action ruling?
And at the University of Arkansas, the school’s Black Graduate Student Association is under fire from the Equal Protection Project for its BIPOC Mentoring Circle series, co-sponsored by Walmart and Sam’s Club, headquartered in nearby Bentonville. John Thomas, a university spokesman, said via email that school officials are “reviewing this matter, which involves a registered student organization initiative.”
The statement also said, “The University is fully committed to ensuring that all members of the University community can fully participate in its programs and activities without regard to race or ethnicity, and requires the same of UA student organizations.” No Black Graduate Student Association members responded to interview requests.
Yet the Latinx On The Rise Mentoring Program — which is organized by the NWA Hispanic Leadership Council in northwest Arkansas and counts the University of Arkansas as a partner and supporter — still matches Hispanic students with professionals. That was how Chris Molina, a senior and first-generation student whose parents immigrated from El Salvador, received guidance from Marc Mund, who works in biotech and is connected with the Hispanic community through his wife, who is Mexican.
Molina’s parents are hard-working — his father drives a truck for Walmart and his mother does laundry in a nursing home — but are not poised to advise him on a business career. Mund’s mentoring, said Molina, helped him think beyond matters like pay to “what career escalation looked like at different companies, what I can expect my life to look like,” and when to attend graduate school.
This was valuable information. As a first-year student living at home, Molina recalled at first even being unsure how classes worked, where to find food or tutoring help on campus, and where to make friends. On his first day of class, he put the school building address in Google Maps, not understanding the difficulties of parking on a large campus. Finally, through the Multicultural Center, he connected to students with similar experiences. Then, an email to his university account invited him to the mentoring program where he matched with Mund.
When they first met, Mund saw Molina as “someone with a lot of gifts and talents” but “he wasn’t really sure what he wanted.” With Mund’s guidance, Molina landed a corporate internship at Sam’s Club last summer. He was so successful that after graduating from the Sam M. Walton College of Business next spring, Molina will begin his career there.
Campus pipeline and mentoring experiences offer students like Ricard and Molina access to information others may absorb because of who their parents are or how they grew up. Casting campus offerings as broadly inclusive rather than focused on a specific group or groups might risk “ignoring the needs of those historically underrepresented,” said Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.
While “the goal is for students to all feel welcome in these spaces,” campuses still must take into account the disadvantages students experience that affect what help they need to navigate their education, she said. Suggesting we suddenly have “a level playing field,” said Granberry Russell, “is problematic.”
Related: The college degree gap between white and Black Americans is getting worse
In the place of racial, ethnic and gender labels, some schools are embracing experiences or identities such as “low-income,” “first-generation” and “veteran” — or simply scrapping controversial wording. After the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Creando Comunidad: Community Engaged Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Fellows program faced a complaint from the Equal Protection Project in January, it became just “Creando Comunidad.” Rather than explicitly gathering BIPOC students, applicants instead now must show “demonstrated interest or experience in promoting equity, inclusion, and social justice for communities of color.”
Ciboney Reglos, a former program member who graduated in May, is now a health coordinator for the Minnesota Department of Health and previously ran a Covid vaccine clinic for her Filipino community. As someone who has seen the power of acknowledging identity in her own work, she is disappointed by the removal of the explicitly BIPOC aspect of Creando Comunidad.
She found being around others who shared similar experiences “one of the most valuable things that I took away from the program.” Now, as she encourages underserved communities to get vaccinated or do health screenings, she observes that it matters to provide people “a space where you know that your identity is going to be respected and humanized.” Being from an underrepresented community herself, she said, lets her more effectively connect with those she serves. In fact, said Reglos, “it’s one of the reasons I was drawn to the job.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or [email protected]. This story about pipeline programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
MPR reports the Minnesota House GOP will challenge the recount results in a Shakopee House race. “The recount may be over, but the investigation into the 21 missing ballots in District 54A is still ongoing,” House GOP Speaker-Designate Lisa Demuth said in a press release.”
KTTC reports Byron community members are calling for the resignation of the superintendent due to a budget crisis that has been ongoing since the spring. “To ease the budget, the district attempted to pass an operating referendum for $1.9 million. That referendum failed during the November election.”
Related: Anoka-Hennepin school board votes to cut hundreds of admin jobs, but saves teachers for now (KARE)
KSTP reports local and state authorities are investigating a number of suspicious fires in Sawyer County, the latest being at a gas station in Radisson. “The fire is the fourth to have happened in Sawyer County in the last week and the second in the town of Radisson.”
Via Star Tribune: “The University of Minnesota has installed temporary fencing on a bridge to reduce the risk of suicide attempts.”
MPR reports at Tuesday’s turkey pardoning ceremony, Gov. Tim Walz and his agriculture advisors discussed President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada saying, “We’ll watch those moves closely.”
KAXE reports the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness saw a 3% overall decrease in visitors in 2023 but off-season visitors increased by 13%.
Mark Lillienfeld, a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide investigator, has been deemed ineligible for rehire after a police officer who attended one of his training lectures last year accused him of making racist comments and repeatedly giving a Nazi-like salute during the class, according to an internal affairs report.
The officer, who is Black, also alleged Lillienfeld joked that she and another Black officer in the class would be the most likely suspects if anyone jumped him in the parking lot after the May 2023 lecture.
Following a probe, this year the Sheriff’s Department decided to put a “Do Not Rehire” designation in Lillienfeld’s personnel file, according to a department statement this week and the 40-page report released this month. Though the report contains little information about the investigators’ reasoning, it includes summaries of nearly three dozen witness interviews followed by three pages outlining the policy violations alleged and discipline recommended.
Tom Yu, the attorney representing Lillienfeld, said the allegations against his client were “completely baseless” and questioned why the woman who complained — a Los Angeles Police Department traffic investigator — took the class in the first place.
“The city of Los Angeles would be a safer place if she spent that kind of energy and time on her own caseload,” Yu told The Times. “The investigation was purportedly about a race or gender-based discrimination — when my client has already retired and has no standing to appeal or grieve the one-sided investigation.”
The California Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training — which oversees law enforcement training standards statewide — said in a statement Tuesday that it found out about the incident only recently. The commission currently approves instructors based on information submitted by local agencies, the statement said, and it doesn’t have a way to get rid of instructors whom it deems inappropriate.
“The Commission met last week and discussed this regulatory matter and are planning to make changes so that in the future we do have the ability to remove instructors such as this,” the statement said.
In the meantime, the commission said, the Sheriff’s Department and other agencies “should be doing their due diligence on checking who their instructors are and if there are prior incidents.”
This is not the first time Lillienfeld has run afoul of department policies. In 2008, internal affairs records show he was given a written reprimand for referring to a woman as a “broad” and repeatedly using profanity during a different training lecture. After retiring in 2016, he began working as an investigator for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, where he was later caught on camera posing as a deputy in order to sneak contraband fast food to an inmate at Men’s Central Jail.
Afterward, the Sheriff’s Department temporarily banned him from the jails. After Alex Villanueva became sheriff in late 2018, he rehired Lillienfeld to join his public corruption squad, which, among other things, criminally investigated a Times reporter who was leaked a list of problem deputies.
Lillienfeld left the department again in January 2023 after Villanueva lost reelection. This year, during an inquiry into the public corruption squad, Lillienfeld testified that the incident at Men’s Central Jail was part of a plan to overturn a wrongful conviction by winning the trust of the real killer and coaxing out a confession.
By the May 2023 training incident, Lillienfeld was working as an outside vendor. The Sheriff’s Department said this week it will not hire him as an instructor for future classes.
The complaint that spurred the investigation and “Do Not Rehire” designation stemmed from a two-week homicide investigator course held at a Holiday Inn in La Mirada. Though the state covered payments to guest lecturers, the Sheriff’s Department designed the curriculum and planned the speakers.
On the first day of class, May 8, Lillienfeld delivered a morning lecture on the mind-set of homicide investigators followed by an afternoon lecture on case management and interacting with witnesses. About 30 officers and deputies from across Southern California attended the training. The Sheriff’s Department redacted all of their names in the report, as well as that of the Los Angeles police officer at the center of the complaint.
At the beginning of the course, according to what the LAPD officer later told investigators, the sergeant who oversaw the training warned the class that some of the instructors were “old school” and were “a little rough around the collar.” (When investigators later interviewed the sergeant, he said he did not recall saying anything to that effect, according to the report.)
“Throughout the entire lecture, Subject Lillienfeld was rude, condescending, unprofessional, and made inappropriate comments to several students in the class,” investigators wrote in their summary of the officer’s interview.
They said the officer told them she believed Lillienfeld targeted Asian and Black students with off-color jokes, once calling the only two Asian students “Chinamen” and repeatedly making fun of a woman’s name. The officer also told investigators Lillienfeld talked a lot of “crap” about the Los Angeles Police Department and how its investigations were “messed up.”
During the lecture, the report says, “Lillienfeld also clicked his heels together and extended one of his arms out like Hitler,” while saying something that sounded like “hike” or “height.”
The woman told investigators she wasn’t sure whether it was intended to be a Nazi salute because she’d seen Nazi salutes only on television. She said that she thought Lillienfeld might have been doing it as a joke or because of a “nervous condition” but that it felt inappropriate because it “looked like something white supremacist groups do,” according to the report.
At the end of the class, she alleged, Lillienfeld apologized to her and the other Black woman — a Menifee Police Department officer — and thanked them for letting him make fun of them. Then, she told investigators, Lillienfeld allegedly told class participants that if they saw him outside in the parking lot with two bullets in the back of his head, they should look to the two Black women as the suspects.
The Los Angeles police officer later detailed her concerns to a Sheriff’s Department detective who was monitoring the class, and the detective alerted the sergeant who had coordinated the class.
When the sergeant pulled the officer aside to talk, she didn’t give him many details because she wasn’t sure if she could trust him. Still, the report says, she told the sergeant she was offended by Lillienfeld’s presentation, especially the comments he’d allegedly made singling out the two Black women as hypothetical suspects.
The Menifee police officer told investigators that she remembered Lillienfeld was funny, but that she didn’t find the humor offensive or feel singled out by his jokes. She recalled hearing him say something about one of the Asian students, but couldn’t remember what. She said she didn’t remember seeing him give a Nazi salute.
And though she told investigators she remembered hearing Lillienfeld’s comments about the Black women “jumping him,” she said she thought it was just a joke and wasn’t offended.
Several months later, when internal affairs investigators interviewed more than two dozen other officers and deputies who attended or monitored the class, almost all said they didn’t recall seeing anything inappropriate. Some said Lillienfeld was funny, and several spoke highly of his lecture. One said Lillienfeld kept “putting his foot in his mouth” when talking to the two Black women.
Another — a La Verne police officer whose name was also redacted — said Lillienfeld repeatedly did a “weird thing” during class in which he would click his heels together and throw up his arm in a way the officer described as a “Nazi salute.” Lillienfeld did the salute two or three times during his lecture and at one point said “Sieg Heil” as he did, according to what the officer told investigators.
The officer said he thought Lillienfeld did the Nazi salute while trying to make a point regarding one of the investigations he taught, but he couldn’t remember the specifics.
After the class ended, the Los Angeles police officer detailed her concerns in her class evaluation, which sparked the internal investigation.
When investigators tried to interview Lillienfeld in April, the file says, he immediately started recording them, then asked several questions about the case before refusing to do the interview. That same month, according to state commission records, Lillienfeld began working as a detective for the South Pasadena Police Department. It’s unclear whether he still works there.
Lillienfeld’s case marks at least the second time in recent months that a high-profile former department member has been hit with a “Do Not Rehire” designation. In January, The Times reported that Villanueva had also been deemed ineligible for rehire after officials found he discriminated against L.A. County Inspector General Max Huntsman. Villanueva later sued the county over that decision. In September, a federal judge tossed out the case, though Villanueva has since refiled and the case is pending.
Madison Hamilton graduated from Canoga Park Senior High School in spring with multiple accolades: She was high school valedictorian with a 4.5 GPA who aced all eight of her AP tests. She tutored fellow students with special needs and founded a social club for them. And she received a rarefied admission offer from Stanford University, one of the most selective institutions in the nation.
But Hamilton turned Stanford down for UCLA.
She said the Westwood campus’ welcoming environment for Black students like her was the deciding factor. During the spring, for instance, UCLA invited her to campus for an African American Academic Excellence event, where she met Black faculty, including Tracy L. Johnson, dean of the Division of Life Sciences and professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology.
“Seeing a Black professor who looked like me in a field I wanted to go into really inspired me and made me want to go to UCLA even more,” Hamilton said. “It made me feel like UCLA really wanted me.”
Madison Hamilton, a first-year student at UCLA, said she connected with Black faculty, staff and students at the campus.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
While other elite universities around the nation have seen precipitous declines in diversity in their first class enrolled after the U.S. Supreme Court banned affirmative action, UCLA has bucked that trend with record numbers of Black and Latino students in fall 2024. Like all California public educational institutions, UCLA has been barred from considering race, sex, ethnicity, color or national origin in admissions under Proposition 209, which voters approved in 1996. That forced the university to develop race-neutral policies — and more than 25 years of work on that front is paying off.
UCLA increased its number of Black students by 5.1% and Latinos by 4.3%. Asians and Native Americans stayed about the same, and white students declined by 8.8% among 6,118 first-year students from California and other states enrolled this fall.
UCLA made similar gains for transfer students: The number of Black students increased by 4.5%, Latinos by 5.6% and Asians by 1.5%. Native Americans fell by 28% and whites by 2.8%.
UCLA enrollment greatly differs from other elite schools
Those gains in Black and Latino enrollment contrast sharply with outcomes at other selective institutions in their first post-affirmative-action class. Among 37 top universities and colleges that have posted fall 2024 enrollment data, 30 reported declines in Black students and 23 saw drops in Latino students, according to a tracker by Education Reform Now, a nonpartisan, nonprofit educational organization.
The number of Black students enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, for instance, fell by 66.1% and Latinos by 51.2% in fall 2024 compared with the average during the previous two years. Both demographic groups declined at MIT by 64.3% and 26.7%, respectively, and at Stanford by 37.5% and 11.8% during those same periods.
At Harvard, USC and Pomona College, enrollment of Black students dropped but Latino enrollment increased. Yale and Northwestern, like UCLA, saw increases in both Black and Latino enrollment in their fall class.
“For a lot of these institutions, this past year was a brand new environment” for admissions, said David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer of the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling. “Even though after the Supreme Court’s decision, all colleges and universities reiterated their commitment to equity and access, it can take time to change admission policies because of the sheer diversity of stakeholders that are involved in setting those policies.”
He noted that the vast majority of the nation’s 2,000 four-year colleges and universities have not needed to use affirmative action to parcel out coveted seats because they admit most applicants. His association’s surveys over the years have found that only about 30% of four-year institutions considered race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.
But for colleges and universities newly grappling with how to recruit, admit and enroll diverse students in race-neutral ways, Hawkins said, UCLA offers a useful road map. Two years ago, as the lawsuit against affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina was making its way to the high court, the national college counseling organization invited UCLA to present a primer on how it rebounded from the sharp drop in Black and Latino students triggered by Proposition 209 — and restored diversity with race-neutral efforts.
UCLA recruitment runs deep
The biggest takeaway, Hawkins said, was UCLA’s “ground game.” He praised UCLA’s concerted efforts to build connections with high schools, community organizations and families whose students the university wanted to attract. “They really just very clearly pulled out all of the stops,” he said.
Gary Clark, UCLA associate vice chancellor of enrollment management, said key programs include a collaboration with 28 L.A. Unified high schools, which helps the counselors, principals and district leaders understand early on what rigorous coursework and preparation are needed to prepare their students to be a competitive UCLA applicant.
UCLA, like other University of California campuses, provides direct college counselors — sometimes embedded at the high schools — to supplement the school’s own staff. UCLA campus clubs, such as the Afrikan Student Union, offer welcome events. Campus tours and Bruin Day for all admitted students feature multilingual assistance so parents can receive information in the language they are most comfortable speaking. And UCLA faculty members of diverse backgrounds have become more involved in the recruitment process — helping students like Hamilton see themselves in their success.
Clark also said UCLA has focused on raising money for institutional scholarships to supplement state and federal financial aid, which helps attract underserved students. About 28% of first-year students from California and other states were low-income and 29% were the first in their families to attend college. Among transfer students, 45% were low-income and 41% first-generation.
And partnerships with community colleges have helped UCLA enroll the largest number of transfer students in the UC system. They made up 37% of UCLA’s new class, more than meeting the state’s target of one transfer student for every two first-year students enrolled. Nine out of 10 transfer students were from a California community college.
It took decades to see strong results
Clark said the progress did not come overnight but through “slow and steady” gains.
UCLA’s enrollment of Black students, for instance, plunged after Proposition 209 took effect in 1997 — to 144, or 3% of first-year students in 1998 from 236, or 6%, in 1996. In fall 2024, Black enrollment had increased to 486, or about 8% of first-year students from California and other states.
Latino enrollment dropped to 439, or 10%, in 1998 from 699, or 18%, in 1996. In fall 2024, 1,582 Latinos enrolled, or nearly 26% of first-year students.
Asians were the largest group at 39% of the fall 2024 first-year class, with whites at 22% and Native Americans 1%.
Clark credited his team’s hard work for the gains in diversity this year, but he also gave a shout out to the new students, who had to navigate through major snafus in the federal financial aid application process as college applicants last year.
“You’ve got to give credit to these students and their families for the resilience that they showed,” Clark said.
Luis Barbosa never gave up on his dream to attend UCLA — even after he was rejected as a first-year applicant two years ago. He said he fell into a deep depression and began resenting his first-generation status, blaming his Mexican immigrant parents for not better educating him on how to be a competitive college applicant.
But a counselor at Segerstrom High School in Santa Ana told him he could take the community college route to UCLA. He enrolled at Irvine Valley College. There, he overcame his fears and learned to approach counselors and faculty for help. He stayed on top of courses needed for UCLA and sought tutoring to help transform his grades from Bs and Cs in high school to A’s in community college. He took on leadership roles as a mentor to younger students, an officer in the honor society and a campus ambassador to promote higher education.
“I was really in a dark place, but I constantly told myself I can either let fear be my future or I will let fear be my motivation to drive me to do things to get to UCLA,” Barbosa said.
UCLA did not improve the diversity of its student body overnight but through years of steady progress.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
America Jimenez is also the daughter of Mexican immigrants — her father is a truck driver and her mother works at a flea market. She dared not dream of attending UCLA because she feared rejection. But with her 4.5 GPA from Aspire Pacific Academy in Huntington Park, leadership roles in student government and maturity she developed from taking care of her younger sister — even on exam nights — when her parents were at work, Jimenez got the admission offer from UCLA. She and her mother both cried with joy.
Jimenez said she has found a welcoming community at UCLA, with roommates of similar Latina backgrounds and involvement with Hermanas Unidas, a campus group that provides support and resources for Chicana and Latina women.
Hamilton said the Black Bruin Resource Center gives her a sense of belonging as she thinks about the Black pioneers who walked the campus before her, such as baseball legend Jackie Robinson and Ralph Bunche, a civil rights icon who was the first African American awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her father also graduated from UCLA with a political science degree.
At the same time, she said, she was thrilled to attend a university with students of so many other backgrounds, a departure from Canoga Park High, whose students are 87% Latino.
“As a Black student, I love being around people who look like me, but I also get joy being with people who don’t look like me,” she said. “I’m grateful I can be at such an integrated campus. Everyone here is so supportive and I feel they believe in me.”
Four years ago, rural — and staunchly conservative — Inyo County delivered an election day surprise when voters there chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump by just 14 votes.
Before 2020, the rugged county in the Eastern Sierra had not backed a Democrat for president since 1964, when voters chose Lyndon B. Johnson.
Longtime locals wondered if a pandemic-era influx of new residents from more urban parts of California — most of them Democrats or independents — had forever purpled the place.
Would Inyo County once again spurn Trump in 2024?
It would not.
As of Tuesday, Trump was carrying the county by 3 percentage points, beating Vice President Kamala Harris there by 267 votes.
County Registrar Danielle Sexton said there were 12 ballots that had not yet been formally tallied due to signature verification issues. Of those, seven ballots had been “cured” — and will be counted — after elections officials have contacted the voters by knocking on their doors or calling. The other five ballots have issues pending.
“Thankfully, this time nobody is winning or losing by those 12 votes,” Sexton said. She added that despite the nation’s — and local election volunteers’ — political divisions, polling places had been calm and cordial on election day.
“Everybody is so stressed out on both sides of the issues, and it is so awesome to see the county getting together at the polling places regardless of what side they’re on,” she said. “Everybody had a great time. It was really polite, and I was just proud of everybody.”
Considering Trump carried Inyo County in 2016 by 13 percentage points, Biden’s victory there in 2020 was quietly one of the most dramatic red-to-blue flips in the country.
The only other California county to flip blue in 2020 after voting for Trump four years earlier was mostly rural Butte County, which saw massive displacement after the deadly Camp fire destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018. As of Tuesday, Trump was leading in Butte County by 2.9%, or 2,670 votes.
State law requires counties to finalize their official tallies 30 days after an election, by Dec. 5 this year. Secretary of State Shirley Weber will certify the results on Dec. 13.
David Blacker, chairman of the Inyo County Republican Central Committee, said that “maybe we went 14 votes purple last time, but we certainly reestablished that Inyo is a red county.”
“The RINOs and Democrats have been recklessly spending,” says Lynette McIntosh, right, at a Bishop City Council candidate forum last month in Inyo County’s only incorporated city.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
As in other parts of the country, Blacker said, the economy seemed to be voters’ top concern in vast Inyo County — which is home to about 19,000 people, is composed of mostly public lands, and relies heavily upon tourists’ financial ability to vacation there.
Rural California, he said, was hit especially hard by Biden-era inflation, and residents there often pay more for groceries due to shipping costs to out-of-the-way places. They also tend to have to drive farther than their urban counterparts, and gas prices tend to be higher than in the rest of the state.
“You can’t have the kind of spike in inflation that we had and then just kind of shrug that off,” said Blacker, who lives and works in Death Valley National Park, which covers almost half of the county.
Nina Weisman, chair of the Inyo County Democratic Central Committee, said she was disappointed but not at all surprised that her county voted for Trump, given the rightward shift in American politics this year.
After Trump won in 2016, local liberals were fired up. They restarted the Inyo County Democratic Central Committee, which had been inactive. They organized a women’s march and Black Lives Matter protests.
This time around, the resistance is a little more tired — but not gone yet, said Weisman, who lives in Independence.
“It’s exhausting,” she said. “But I’m hoping they just get madder.”
There were a few new attendees at the central committee’s first meeting after this election, Weisman said, and representatives of the state Democratic Party “came specifically to give us pep talks.”
“Our people were really depressed, but we had some guest speakers and new blood coming in,” she said.
That gave Weisman — a seasonal park ranger who has worked in Alaska and worries deeply about Trump loosening environmental regulations — much-needed hope.
Meanwhile, Lynette McIntosh, who lives just outside Bishop, could not be more delighted by the election results. She is 73, retired from the custom window covering business she and her husband ran together, and was thrilled by Trump’s campaign promise to end taxation of Social Security benefits.
“The RINOs and Democrats have been recklessly spending,” she said, referring to so-called Republicans-in-name-only who are not loyal enough to Trump.
She has loved the incoming president’s Cabinet picks so far, and believes that over the next four years, naysayers “need to just butt out and let them do their jobs.”
William Dale Archerd drank highballs, married frequently and despised 9-to-5 employment. He was Arkansas-born, slender, with pale blue eyes and wavy silver hair. He inspired romantic devotion in women and trust in criminal confederates. For decades, his wives and acquaintances were fatally stricken with sudden, convulsion-inducing illness that coroners did not grasp as murder.
His motive was greed, though he never made much. He was a frail 55 when police finally arrested him at his Alhambra home in 1967. “Well, it took you long enough!” he quipped. A prosecutor called him “the greatest cold-blooded killer since Bluebeard,” and a judge called him the most evil defendant he’d ever seen. There rarely seemed to be a dent in Archerd’s cool. Even on death row, he retained his aura of blithe unconcern.
Archerd was a natural salesman, at various times hawking vitamins, hearing aids and folding doors. The merchandise he sold best was himself. From 1930 to 1965, he married seven women, sometimes not bothering to divorce the previous one.
He learned his special method of murder — which allowed him to get away with it for so long — as a young hospital attendant. At Camarillo State Hospital, he worked off and on at the “insulin shock ward” from 1939 to 1941. It was a 20-bed dorm for the treatment of schizophrenia in the desperate era before antipsychotic drugs.
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.
As part of the therapy, now discredited, injections of insulin would plunge a patient into deep coma as the brain was starved of sugar.
A pencil was rubbed along the ball of the patient’s foot. If the toes fanned out in a so-called Babinski response, “he was reverting back to first man, an ape from which we are supposed to have sprung,” as one of Archerd’s former co-workers would testify. This meant death was close. Glucose brought patients awake, sometimes with brain damage misinterpreted as psychological improvement.
Because insulin is a natural hormone and injections are quickly absorbed, an overdose was nearly impossible to pinpoint as a cause of death. For at least six victims across 19 years, police believed, it was Archerd’s choice of poison.
His first suspected murder was in 1947. His friend William Jones Jr., a 34-year-old ex-fireman, was charged with the statutory rape of a babysitter. It promised to ruin the family’s good name. Archerd jumped in to help. The Joneses gave him a few thousand dollars to buy off the babysitter’s family. Archerd handed over $300 and kept the rest. He told Jones how to fake a head injury and avoid court — an insulin injection would mimic the symptoms. Jones convulsed hideously while Archerd stood quietly at his bedside. “Encephalitis,” the coroner said.
Police believed William Dale Archerd killed three of his wives, two men, and his 15-year-old nephew. From left, top, are William Edward Jones Jr., Zella Winders Archerd and Juanita Plum Archerd. Below are Frank Stewart, Burney Kirk Archerd and Mary Brinker Post Archerd.
(Jack Carrick / Los Angeles Times)
Nine years later, he summoned police to the Covina home where he was living with his fourth wife, 48-year-old Zella Winders. He told a ludicrous story: Two robbers had broken into the house and injected her with a mysterious substance. Police noted two puncture marks on her buttocks. He refused to let her go to the hospital, and soon after, she was dead, with two extra puncture marks. “Broncho-pneumonia,” the coroner said.
Two years later, he married his fifth wife, 46-year-old Juanita Plum, in Las Vegas. She was dead within days amid unexplained sweating and convulsions. When her will was read and Archerd learned his take was $1, he dug his fingers into her daughter’s shoulders so hard it nearly buckled her knees. “Accidental barbiturate overdose,” the coroner said.
In 1960, he persuaded a 54-year-old acquaintance, Frank Stewart, to participate in an insurance scam. Insulin would counterfeit the symptoms of a head injury. “Cerebral hemorrhage,” the autopsy said.
The following year, he pressured his 15-year-old nephew, Burney Kirk Archerd, into a similar scheme. They would pretend the boy had been hit by a truck, and an insulin injection would mimic the effects. “Bronchopneumonia and cerebral hemorrhage,” the coroner said.
By this point, Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives were convinced Archerd was a serial killer and knew how he was doing it. To Harold “Whitey” White, a sheriff’s lieutenant who recounted nearly a decade on the investigation in his memoir “Whitey’s Career Case: The Insulin Murders,” Archerd was “that rotten bastard,” “that slimy bastard” and “that crafty son-of-a-bitch.”
“It’s a hell of a helpless feeling to know that a psychopath like William Dale Archerd can kill so many people, to know how he kills and why, but not to be able to come up with a criminal cause of death in order to prove murder,” White wrote.
Archerd killed his seventh wife, 60-year-old Mary Brinker Post, in November 1966. A novelist, she had written the bestselling “Annie Jordan,” about a plucky heroine in boom town Seattle modeled on her pioneer family. She suffered hideous convulsions and died at Pomona Valley Hospital. “Hypoglycemic shock due to undetermined,” the autopsy said.
The Sheriff’s Department put White on the investigation full time. His team set out to prove a circumstantial case that the killings were united by a common scheme and plan. “I decided Archerd’s crime spree had gone on long enough. I was going to nail him if it took the rest of my career to do it,” White wrote.
He enlisted doctors — including leading insulin researchers — to reexamine the medical files in the six known deaths. All the deaths, the doctors concluded, were attributable to insulin overdose. Brain slides of some victims showed massive damage that could only have been caused by insulin-induced glucose starvation.
William Dale Archerd, right, entering court with a bailiff in December 1967.
(Bruce Cox / Los Angeles Times)
When White showed up at Archerd’s house to arrest him, he found the killer painfully thin, frail and “miserable looking.” Nevertheless, White had to resist the urge to punch “the evil son-of-a-bitch right in the mouth.”
Archerd went on trial for the three L.A. County deaths — wives No. 4 and No. 7 and his nephew — while prosecutors used the other three to establish his decades-long pattern.
The star witness was Archerd’s third wife, a former nurse named Dorothea Sheehan, who was infuriated when he annulled their marriage to wed another woman the next day. She was “one pissed-off ex-wife,” White wrote, “and she wanted blood!”
On the stand, she recalled musing with Archerd about how murder-by-insulin would make an excellent plot for a mystery story. How he had asked her to buy him a vial of insulin and to inject Jones for the insurance scam. How he said that because Jones raped more than one babysitter, “it was just as well he had died.” And how, when she read about Zella Winders’ death in the newspaper, she confronted him.
“I said smartly, ‘It wouldn’t have been insulin, would it?’ And he sort of kicked me in the ankle and looked around as if he thought my house might have been bugged.”
William Dale Archerd being led out of the courtroom after his arraignment in July 1967.
(Larry Sharkey / Los Angeles Times)
As she recounts in her book “Assassins… Serial Killers… Corrupt Cops…,” Mary Neiswender got to know him while covering his trial for the Long Beach Press-Telegram. He told her stories designed to elicit pity — that he dug ditches as a boy and needed 43 operations for malformed limbs. She decided he was a pathological liar.
“His guards would tell me later: ‘Y’know, he expected to beat this and was counting on you for his next wife,’” she wrote. “I wasn’t flattered.”
During the two-month trial, Archerd was unfailingly relaxed, friendly and respectful to his attorneys. Unlike most defendants in his position, he did not second-guess any of his lawyers’ decisions. “I can’t recall a single time he evinced any stress,” Ira Reiner, an attorney who represented Archerd, recently told The Times. “Not a thing bothered him.”
He chose to have his case heard by a judge, rather than a jury, thinking he was less likely to get the death penalty. Judge Adolph Alexander found him guilty — making him the first convicted insulin murderer in the United States — and sent him to death row.
“He figured he had the perfect scheme,” said Reiner, 88, who later became the L.A. County district attorney. “Had there been one case charged and only one, there’s certainly a reasonable possibility that a judge or jury would have acquitted. The problem was one after another.”
When Archerd’s death warrant was signed, Reiner won a last-minute stay. He went to San Quentin to deliver the order in person, rather than risk sending a fax that got there too late. He remembers Archerd’s nonchalance on learning the good news.
“It’s hard to describe how utterly relaxed he was,” Reiner said. Archerd was indignant, however, that prison officials had offered him a last meal of steak or lobster, but not both.
“He said, ‘They’re gonna kill me, and they want to argue with me about whether I can have steak and lobster.’ He said, ’It isn’t fair, it isn’t right.’ Like he was arguing with a waiter.”
Archerd’s death sentence was eventually commuted to life in prison, and he died of natural causes at age 65 in 1977. He was “a charming sociopath,” Reiner said. “You can’t kill that many people and be so relaxed and charming unless there’s a little piece missing there.”
William Dale Archerd, left, confers with his attorneys Philip Erbsen, center, and Ira Reiner in court in February 1968.
Rain is coming in south San Diego, which means higher water levels in the polluted Tijuana River — and, potentially, even worse air quality.
Now, residents worry that the home air filters newly provided by San Diego County won’t be enough to curb the noxious air from the rising river.
And despite increased federal and state attention in recent weeks, local officials and residents say that solutions are still elusive and distant in the wake of the November elections and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s refusal to declare a state of emergency over the situation.
Last month, Newsom visited the decrepit facilities at the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant in San Diego and the refurbished San Antonio de los Buenos plant in Baja California for the first time.
After years of deferred maintenance, the plant in San Diego received an additional $103 million in the 2024 federal budget for repairs that will take years. The Baja plant is expected to start processing sewage soon, and once both plants are online and fully operational, sewage flows are expected to be reduced by 90%.
Other federal agencies are also investigating the health concerns of nearby residents who have been suffering respiratory illnesses and unexplained stomach bugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention arrived last month to conduct a health survey. Local officials and more than 500 residents have signed a petition asking the Environmental Protection Agency to declare the river a Superfund site and look into the presence of hazardous waste in the riverbed.
“Thanks to our partnership with international, federal, and local partners, we are making real progress,” Newsom said in a statement last month after his visit.
For its part, the county Board of Supervisors voted last month to purchase $2.7 million worth of air purifiers for residents, with the money ultimately coming from the California Air Resources Board.
Unanswered calls for a state of emergency
Some critics argue that the politicians haven’t acted with the necessary sense of urgency. Newsom met with Baja Gov. Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda, San Diego County Supervisor Nora Vargas and the International Boundary Waste and Water Commission, but local officials and residents felt snubbed.
“It feels like it was just a photo op,” said Marcus Bush, a council member for National City and a member of the Air Pollution Control District who signed the petition to the EPA. No San Diego County mayors or media outlets were invited to Newsom’s news briefing; when asked, the governor’s office offered no explanation.
“I would like to give our governor the benefit of the doubt,” Bush said, but added, “Why aren’t you taking calls or info?” He wondered aloud whether Newsom was dodging questions about his refusal to declare a state of emergency for the region.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, in blue shirt, meets with officials in San Diego on Oct. 28, 2024.
(Courtesy of Supervisor Nora Vargas)
All 18 San Diego County mayors signed a letter this year asking Newsom to declare a state of emergency. The California Coastal Commission also voted unanimously to ask the Biden administration to declare a federal state of emergency, but under federal law, such requests must come from the governor. Newsom has rebuffed those entreaties, and the White House seems no closer to making any significant moves forward.
In letters addressing the California Coastal Commission and mayors of San Diego County, Newsom’s office asserted that declaring a federal state of emergency would not accelerate the repairs needed at the sewage plant. The office also said that it did not consider the situation at the river to fit the definition of a natural disaster under federal law.
Residents have argued that a state of emergency could bring the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to clean up and divert the river. Last year, heavy rainstorms washed into the river thousands of tons of debris that took nearly five months to clear and broke several pumps in the sewage system. Some have asked for more efficient trash skimmers that could help prevent waste from clogging the treatment plant.
“Everyone agrees that raw sewage in a river is an environmental and health emergency in crisis, but [Newsom and Vargas] are also actively doing things that undermine the emergency,” Bush said.
The Superfund split
Muddying matters further, the county supervisors voted last month to delay consideration of a petition asking the EPA to declare the river a Superfund site. Vargas, who represents the south San Diego district most affected by the noxious odors, voted in favor of the delay.
The petition was introduced by Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, who represents the area along the coast just north of the Tijuana River’s mouth. After the vote, Lawson-Remer joined other local officials to file the petition anyway.
“I moved forward because I think it’s urgent,” she said in an interview. It “would be nice for the Board of Supervisors as a whole to act, but it’s not necessary.”
In the board meeting last month, Lawson-Remer said she was concerned about more pollutants in the river than just sewage. Toxic chemicals and heavy metals have been detected that could be leaching into the sediment — something local officials are not equipped to clean up on their own. A petition is the first step in a lengthy process that could take years, even if the EPA decides the river is eligible for a Superfund designation.
Vargas did not agree to be interviewed. But in the Board Meeting and in public statements, she cited concerns that moving too hastily to petition the EPA could negatively affect property values and local businesses.
The Voice of San Diego news site reported that Vargas voted against the EPA petition out of concern that a Superfund designation could halt her project to clean up the South Bay to create parks for underserved communities.
“I support the spirit of this board letter,” Vargas said last month. But “this has the potential to delay local efforts already in progress and negatively affect the limited recreational space that we already have in South County.”
The board voted voted 3 to 2 to extend consideration of the petition by 90 days and have the county gather feedback and information.
Lawson-Remer said the reasons Vargas cited for the delay don’t hold water. “The health of our families and health of our children is by far the No. 1 concern,” she said. “Property values are secondary.”
An uncertain future
Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre has been to the White House twice to speak with Brenda Mallory, the chair of President Biden’s Council on Environmental Quality, to ask for assistance. She plans to make one last plea in person next month.
President-elect Donald Trump previously authorized $300 million to stop the cross-border pollution as part of the U.S-Mexico-Canada trade agreement in 2020. But Trump’s vow to cut federal budgets when he takes office in 2025 has Aguirre concerned about a reduction in disaster relief funding. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s choice to lead the EPA, is also expected to scale back regulations.
“If he dismantles the EPA … good luck to all of us, because I don’t know what the strategy will be,” Aguirre said.
A damaged local economy
Meanwhile, residents say that the pollution has already hurt the local economy. Visitors to Imperial Beach have steadily fallen with beach closures due to the contamination, according to numbers provided by the mayor’s office — to just under 700,000 in 2023 from 2.1 million in 2018.
Local restaurateur Gabriel Uribe has run Baja Oyster and Sushi Bar for 25 years in Imperial Beach, a few miles from his ranch, where he also hosts outdoor parties for quinceaneras and graduations.
Guests have left Uribe’s parties early because the air reeks of rotten eggs, he said, and the air filters from the county won’t solve all his problems. “That is like just a Band-Aid on a wound that needs stitching,” he added.
Uribe, who signed the EPA petition, worries that his property’s value could be affected if a Superfund site is declared, or even that his property could be taken through eminent domain. But he wants officials to act urgently to address his health concerns.
“My chest is wheezing. I have an irregular heartbeat,” said Uribe, who’s gone to the emergency room because he couldn’t breathe.
Deborah Vance, who runs a real estate agency in Imperial Beach, said her business has already been affected by the pollution as prospective buyers have been unwilling to purchase property in the city. She struggled to sell four listings in Imperial Beach this last year, a slowdown that had been unheard of in the past.
“It’s beyond impactful,” she said of the pollution. All of the agents who worked with her, she added, have quit or moved on. “It’s devastating.”
Before sheriff’s deputies found his body on Thanksgiving morning last year, shot to death in a desolate stretch of warehouses and pallet yards west of Compton, Eduardo Escobedo Sr. had become rich beyond his dreams.
The impoverished child of East Los Angeles had climbed the ranks of the Sinaloa cartel, the world’s largest drug trafficking empire, working with a son of the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
As the cartel’s main cannabis distributor in California, Escobedo earned the nickname “El Mago” — The Magician — for his ability to make bales of it vanish by the ton.
Indicted in 2014 and later sentenced to nearly five years in prison, Escobedo swore to his family he’d left his narco ties in the past. He opened a successful chain of food trucks and hibachi grill restaurants.
But the whispers still followed him: He must be laundering money through his businesses. Selling chopped steak and fried rice couldn’t sustain his lifestyle of Lamborghinis and Richard Mille watches.
After his death at 39, the questions lingered. Was it a cartel hit? Had he cooperated with law enforcement or crossed the wrong man in the drug trade? Or was it a random conflict that escalated into homicide?
In the year following Escobedo’s killing, the Sinaloa cartel splintered in a conflict defined by relationships between fathers and sons. With El Chapo in prison, his sons are trying to wrest control of the cartel from rivals loyal to their father’s old business partner, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
In L.A., Escobedo left behind nine children. The oldest, Eddie Escobedo Jr., says he knows he will always be known first and foremost as “El Mago’s son,” though his dad never wanted his children to follow him into the narco world.
Eddie Escobedo Jr. is carrying on his father’s hibachi business.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Growing up, Eddie said he knew his father only as a family man who dressed well, drove expensive cars and befriended famous musicians.
Only later did Eddie learn about his father’s meeting in Mexico with the world’s most-wanted kingpin. The Bentley crashed on the 101 Freeway, the driver slumped over with a bullet in his head. The drunken argument at sunrise that ended in gunfire.
“He wanted money in his pockets,” Eddie said of his father. “He wanted to dress nice. He worked for it. He didn’t just dream about it.”
Eddie was 12 when he got the first idea of his father’s line of work. The family was living in Miami when he walked into the dining room one day and saw what looked like millions of dollars in cash piled on the table.
“I was shocked,” he said.
His father told him to go to his room.
“He never spoke to me about, ‘Hey, I do this,’” Eddie, now 24, said in an interview with The Times. “Never. Never.”
The family traces its roots to Chacala, a small town in the highlands of Durango state. Eddie said his grandmother was eight months pregnant with his father when she crossed the border illegally.
They settled in East L.A. Eddie’s grandmother sewed clothes in a factory; his grandfather was a musician who played accordion and guitar in restaurants. Embarrassed by the family’s poverty, Escobedo ditched school to work at a taco stand, his son said.
Escobedo started selling cannabis as a teenager. According to his son, he earned a reputation for being able to sell whatever his suppliers in Mexico sent him.
“He never stole a dollar. He never burned a bridge,” Eddie said. “All that was recognized by the most powerful people.”
Eddie said that when his father was 20, he traveled to Sinaloa’s capital, Culiacán, to meet the bosses: El Chapo and his eldest son, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar.
Authorities escort Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, center, from a plane to a waiting caravan of SUVs.
(AP)
Escobedo and Guzmán Salazar were around the same age and shared an interest in flashy clothing and fast cars. U.S. prosecutors said Escobedo went on to purchase Lamborghinis, a McLaren and a Nissan GTR for Guzmán Salazar.
Now 41, Guzmán Salazar is the reputed leader of Los Chapitos, a cartel faction that formed after his father was captured, extradited to the U.S. and sentenced in 2019 to life in prison.
Los Chapitos are vying with one of Zambada’s sons and allied groups for control of the cartel. The fighting began in late July when Guzmán Salazar’s half-brother allegedly kidnapped Zambada and turned him over to U.S. authorities.
Eddie emphasized that he has nothing to do with the cartel conflict. His father left that business years before he was killed, he said.
But there was one episode in Escobedo’s past that “haunted” him, he said.
Two weeks before Christmas in 2008, a singer named Roberto Tapia took the stage at Placita Olvera for a celebration of the Virgin de Guadelupe.
Escobedo had met Tapia on the Los Angeles nightclub circuit, Eddie said. He said his father “opened a lot of doors” for the U.S.-born singer, who was raised in Sinaloa.
“My dad took him to the Louis Vuitton store for the first time,” Eddie said. Tapia wrote a song in Escobedo’s honor called “Gente de Guzman” — Guzman’s people.
Escobedo’s cousin, Andy Medrano, went to see Tapia at Placita Olvera. Escobedo was so close to Medrano he considered him a brother, Eddie said.
Medrano and two friends, Michael Aleman and Chris Medina, were walking back to their cars at 3 a.m. when a silver Bentley Continental GT drove past them, blasting Norteño music, a witness testified.
The driver was Jose Macias, 25. Nicknamed “Huerito,” Macias’ father was a high-level marijuana trafficker in the Arellano Felix cartel, according to a police report, which was then the dominant group in Tijuana and a rival of the Sinaloans.
A year apart in age, Macias and Escobedo grew up in the same East L.A. neighborhood, Eddie said.
“They both had the same ambition,” he said. “They were both hustlers.”
They hung out in VIP sections of clubs like El Rodeo in Pico Rivera and El Farallon in Lynwood. Sometimes, after drinking too much Buchanan’s whiskey, their entourages got into fights.
As Macias cruised down Alameda Street, someone shot at his Bentley, according to testimony at the trial of Medrano and Aleman. Both men jumped into Medrano’s Dodge Ram and chased Macias onto the 101 Freeway.
A friend of Medrano and Aleman followed in another car. The friend testified he saw muzzle flashes erupt from the driver’s side of the Ram. Shot in the head, Macias crashed into the center divider.
Some police officers speculated Macias was killed in a struggle over the local drug trade. An informant told a different story, according to a police report: Macias had brought his own band to the festival, which Escobedo considered “disrespectful.”
Los Angeles Police Department detectives arrested Escobedo and questioned him, according to court records. He invoked his right to a lawyer and was let go.
Eddie denied his father ordered Macias’ death. In his telling, it grew out of a clash of personalities between their entourages.
“It was something that easily could have been fixed, but both sides, the egos kicked in,” he said. “It escalated into something that didn’t have to happen.”
Prosecutors offered Escobedo’s cousin a deal: 11 years if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. According to Eddie, Medrano said, “I didn’t do it. Why the f— would I take it?”
He went to trial and got convicted of murder. A judge sentenced Medrano to 50 years to life.
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents had tapped the phone of Guzmán Salazar in 2013 when they overheard the kingpin’s son talking to Escobedo.
Guzmán Salazar needed help smuggling marijuana through a tunnel — 5.5 tons of it, Asst. U.S. Atty. Adam Braverman said at a bail hearing. Agents arrested a courier working for Escobedo who was transporting 2.7 tons, Braverman said.
Four months later, after hearing the Guzmán Salazar discuss another shipment with Escobedo, agents seized another 1.2 tons from a second courier, the prosecutor said.
On Aug. 13, 2014, DEA agents arrested Escobedo as he returned to his apartment in downtown Los Angeles. They searched his pockets and found four phones and keys to five cars, a prosecutor wrote in court papers.
Eddie said prosecutors wanted his father to turn on Guzmán Salazar. They could reduce not just his sentence but Medrano’s if he cooperated. “It was a ‘No thank you’ from Andy and my dad,” Eddie said.
When Escobedo pleaded guilty in 2015 to conspiring to distribute marijuana and launder money, he promised his family that he wouldn’t sell another “seed of weed” for the rest of his life, Eddie said.
Released from prison in 2018, Escobedo bought a taco truck and parked it in Pacoima. He soon learned he made next to nothing selling tacos for $2 apiece. His favorite food was hibachi, the chopped steak, chicken, shrimp and lobster served at places like Benihana. He learned to cook the dishes from a friend and renamed the truck “Benihibachi.”
Eddie Escobedo Jr. is carrying on his father’s hibachi business.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Parked near L.A. Live, the truck took off, Eddie said. His father bought a second truck and parked it next to the first. Then he opened a restaurant on Olympic Boulevard, rebranding as “Besthibachi.”
His third year out of prison, the business reported $12 million in income, Eddie said. Some people whispered that his father must be washing drug money through the hibachi chain.
“Honestly I’d say the same thing if someone gets out of prison and reports those kind of numbers,” he said. But he said the long lines at the trucks – there are now eight of them – and three brick and mortar locations were a “testament” to the legitimacy of his father’s money.
Escobedo once paid musicians to recount his skill at selling marijuana and celebrate his ties to Mexico’s most wanted criminals. But by 2022, the lyrics had changed.
In a song called “El Mago,” the band Edicion Especial sang of Escobedo feeding “gringos” at his Japanese restaurants and said his children were “siempre lo más valioso” — always the most important.
“That’s why they won’t see me fall anymore,” the song goes.
The last night of his life, Escobedo went to Pico Rivera Sports Arena to see Ramon Ayala, an accordion player and singer whose music he’d always admired, Eddie said. After the concert, he went to El Farallon in Lynwood.
Nearly 15 years had passed since his and Macias’ entourages had clashed at El Farallon and El Rodeo. Escobedo never grew out of the club scene.
After El Farallon closed for the night, he found an illegal after-hours party. Its organizers had outfitted a warehouse with tables, chairs and couches, according to a coroner’s report. A walk-through metal detector was set up outside the entrance.
The sun had come up by the time an argument broke out between Escobedo and another man, the coroner’s report says.
Eddie said he wasn’t there but spoke to his two brothers who were. They said their father told a drunken man to leave. The drunk got mouthy.
A third man approached them with a gun.
A longtime member of the 18th Street gang, Guillermo “Sad Boy” De Los Angeles had done prison time for trafficking meth and faced charges of extorting protection money from bars in South L.A.
De Los Angeles, 47, was drunk and high on meth when he shot Escobedo 10 times, according to the coroner’s report.
Someone else at the party — the report does not say who — shot De Los Angeles. He died near Escobedo, two bullets in his chest.
Eddie said the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has not told him if they’ve arrested anyone. The detective and lieutenant assigned to the case did not return messages from The Times.
Once again, the rumors flew: It was a targeted killing, ordered by Sinaloa and contracted to De Los Angeles’ gang. Escobedo must have been an informant or returned to the drug business.
Eddie Escobedo Jr. is carrying on his father’s hibachi business.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Eddie said none of this is true. “As stupid as it sounds,” he said, “it was just a bar argument.”
In the year since his father’s death, Eddie and his brothers have carried on the hibachi business. They plan to expand to other states, perhaps even other countries.
Eddie said he is working on a manuscript about Escobedo that he hopes to publish as a book — and one day a movie. He now knows the parts of his father’s past that he tried to keep from him. He still respects what his father made of his life.
“What he did, he did at the highest level. He sold marijuana at the highest level. He sold hibachi at the highest level,” Eddie said, sitting in the dining area of his family’s restaurant on Olympic Boulevard, steps from Crypto.com Arena.
Eddie has followed the war engulfing Sinaloa. The cartel is undergoing a changing of the guard. The old kingpins are locked up, their sons vying for control. It is a world his father never wanted Eddie to be part of.
Escobedo told his son the profits of the drug business didn’t outweigh what it cost you.
“It’s not something you’d recommend to somebody you love,” Eddie said.
