A reputed member of the Mexican Mafia was wounded in a shooting Saturday that left a second man dead in Los Angeles County, authorities said.
At 11 p.m., Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies responded to a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall on Valley View Avenue in La Mirada, where they found two men with gunshot wounds in the parking lot, Lt. Steven De Jong said.
Eric Ortiz, 34, died from gunshot wounds to the chest, De Jong said. The lieutenant declined to name the surviving victim, who remained hospitalized in critical condition. A law enforcement source who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly identified him as Juan Garcia, a Mexican Mafia member known as “Topo.”
De Jong said a group of gang members who were not veterans had rented the VFW hall for some type of gathering. Most attendees had left by the time police arrived, and De Jong said his detectives have “no suspect information whatsoever.”
Originally from the Florencia 13 gang, Garcia, 63, served more than 17 years in federal prison for racketeering. He was convicted of inciting a riot at the Lompoc prison in 2003.
That melee started after prisoners brewed up a batch of contraband alcohol known as pruno, according to a law enforcement report reviewed by The Times. A lieutenant was escorting an inmate to his office for a breathalyzer test when Garcia stepped in front of him.
“You are not taking anybody,” he told the lieutenant, then shoved him. “Den les en la madre,” Garcia said to the other inmates in the module, which prison officials translated as an order to assault the guards.
Eight inmates attacked the lieutenant, punching, kicking and choking him, the report says. As he and about 40 other staff members tried to escape the cellblock, Garcia demanded that one of the officers apologize to him.
The officer hesitated. An inmate punched him in the face. “I’m sorry,” he told Garcia, who then let the staff leave, according to the report. The document says they carried with them a Muslim chaplain who had been beaten unconscious and a food services worker who had been attacked with a broomstick.
The cellblock emptied of prison officials, Garcia broke all the glass in the module and sprayed a fire extinguisher, the report says. With the help of other inmates, he barricaded the entryway with washing and vending machines, then proceeded to smash all of the televisions, microwaves, sprinkler systems and ice machines. Other inmates also beat a prisoner who did not participate in the melee, according to the report.
The associate warden issued riot gear and masks to the guards, who quelled the riot with tear gas, pepper spray, and “flash stun” and “multi blast” grenades, the document says. Twenty-eight staff members and four inmates, including Garcia, suffered injuries ranging from cuts and bruises to a hernia and serious head trauma.
“This was a show of power on the part of inmate Garcia,” an investigator wrote in the report.
After pleading guilty to the crime of rioting at a federal facility, Garcia was sentenced in 2005 to another six years on top of his racketeering term.
A year after his release in 2020, Los Angeles Police Department officers were patrolling 64th Street in South L.A. when they saw a silver Volkswagen Passat double-parked on the wrong side of the street, according to a probation report.
They saw the driver, Garcia, hand a gun to a man standing next to the car, the report says. The man took off running. When the police caught up to him, the 31-year-old member of Florencia 13 seemed “afraid to answer my questions and denied knowing Garcia,” the arresting officer wrote in a report.
Convicted of possessing a gun as a felon, Garcia was sent back to federal prison in 2022 to serve 15 months. Before he was sentenced, Steve Quinonez, chief executive of the Florence Firestone Community Organization, wrote in a letter to the judge that Garcia volunteered for his group.
A “great leader with a big heart,” Garcia mentored young people not to take “the wrong path in life,” he wrote.
De Jong, the sheriff’s lieutenant, asked that anyone with information about Saturday’s shooting contact detectives at (323) 890-5500.
An atmospheric river dumping rain across Northern California and several feet of snow in the Sierra was making its way across the state Friday, bringing flooding and threatening mudslides along with it.
The storm, the first major rainmaker of the season, initially strengthened into a bomb cyclone, a description of how it rapidly intensified before making its way onshore.
It’s now moving south, after strong winds and heavy rain hit the northern edge of the state Wednesday and Thursday.
It rained 3.66 inches in Ukiah on Thursday, breaking the record for the city set in 1977 by a half-inch. Santa Rosa Airport saw 4.93 inches of rain on Thursday, shattering the daily record of 0.93 inches set in 2001.
Across Humboldt and Mendocino counties, the highest rainfall totals were 17.7 inches near Laytonville and around 15 inches near Honeydew in the King Range mountains, according to National Weather Service meteorologist James White in the Eureka office. Over the weekend, the storm could blanket the region with another 1 to 2 inches of rain.
Near Sacramento, Whiskeytown in Shasta County received 12.21 inches while Sims in the Klamath Mountains got 13.37 inches, according to NWS forecaster Bill Rasch in the Sacramento office. The region is expected to get another 1 to 2 inches of rain, with foothill areas in interior Northern California getting anywhere from 2 to 5 inches, he said.
The storm should start bringing snow after Friday, with elevations above 6,000 feet getting between 1 and 3 inches by Tuesday, Rasch said.
“Today is the last big day of rain,” he added.
In a Friday morning forecast, the Weather Service warned that “prolonged rainfall will result in an increased risk of flooding, an increased risk of landslides, and downed trees and power lines across the North Bay.”
Cars are covered in snow during a storm in Soda Springs.
(Brooke Hess-Homeier / Associated Press)
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the rain has been primarily focused on Sonoma, Marin and Napa counties, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Dylan Flynn in the Monterey office. Santa Rosa’s rainfall has been historic, shattering its three-day rainfall record of about 10 inches set in October 2021.
“Over a 72-hour period, we’ve never seen this much rainfall reported anytime of the year,” Flynn said. “This is the most rainfall we’ve seen in the last 123 years.”
At San Francisco International Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration announced a ground delay for the second day in a row as a result of the storm. As of 1:45 p.m. Friday, 441 flights had been delayed and 53 were canceled, according to Flight Aware.
The storm is expected to leave the North Bay and affect the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area on Friday, dumping around 1 to 3 inches across the region before petering out on Saturday, Flynn said. The storm could then extend south into the Central Coast and possibly Southern California.
On Saturday, Los Angeles and Ventura counties could see anywhere from a tenth to a third of an inch of rain. San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties could see up to an inch in some areas.
A second round of rain expected to begin Sunday could be “a little stronger than the first but still likely in the ‘beneficial rain’ category,” the National Weather Service said in its latest L.A. forecast.
Chances are low of flooding or any other significant issues in Southern California, forecasters said, though roads could become slick and snarl traffic.
Concern about the upcoming rainy season has been growing among residents living on and near the Portuguese Bend landslide area in Rancho Palos Verdes, because increased rainfall leads to more groundwater — which is the impetus for the ongoing devastating land movement.
But city officials are hopeful that extensive “winterization efforts,” which include improving drainage, filling in cracks and lining canyon walls, can help minimize the effect of any new rain. Many of those projects have been completed, but some remain underway. The work aims “to best prepare ourselves for the wet weather season ahead,” said David Copp, the city’s deputy public works director.
Parts of the landslide have seen recent slowing, and in some areas, even complete stabilization, the city has reported, but additional rain is always a concern for this unstable region.
The latest storm has brought the statewide precipitation total for the water year from 57% of average to 61%, according to a California Department of Water Resources spokesperson. However, most of the rainfall is in Northern California, with less precipitation reaching central and southern parts of the state that have below-average precipitation this year, according to California Water Watch.
Water levels have risen 3.5 feet at Lake Oroville, the DWR’s largest reservoir, during this atmospheric river, according to the agency. Lake Oroville is at 49% of its total capacity and 95% of its historic average.
Staff writer Grace Toohey contributed to this report.
A man installing Christmas lights in a tree in San Diego County was electrocuted and killed Thursday, according to authorities.
The man, was working near the intersection of Idaho Avenue and Skyline Drive in Escondido when he was electrocuted by a power line, reported KNSD-TV.
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the worker was hospitalized and died of his injuries.
The homeowner the man was working for told KNSD that the accident occurred when the worker threw Christmas lights over the power line.
“Once SDG&E [San Diego Gas & Electric Co.] shut the power down, our crews were able to access the victim via the ladder truck,” Escondido Fire Department Battalion Chief Brian Salazar told KNSD. “Brought the victim down, where he was placed in an ambulance and transported to Palomar Hospital in critical condition.”
SACRAMENTO — Before this year’s presidential election slips into gloomy history, we should pause to slam our moldy, undemocratic vote-counting system called the electoral college.
If Donald Trump had to win, it’s good that he prevailed in both the archaic electoral college and the national popular vote.
The popular vote should always settle who is elected president. Name one other office in America that’s not decided by who gets the most votes — from state governor down to first-grade class president.
But the national popular vote doesn’t count for squat in a U.S. presidential election. All that counts is our ancient electoral college system, rooted in the Founders’ appeasement of Southern slave states.
It’s beneficial, however, that Trump apparently also won the popular vote. Because now we should be able to hold a rational conversation about the evils of the electoral college without being tagged as poor-loser partisans whining that the Democrat lost despite having been favored by most American voters.
There are two bad things about our electoral college system:
Big states, little states, it doesn’t matter. If they’re blue or red, their voters are relegated to the cheap seats as distant spectators to the main event being fought in a few purple swing states. The blues and reds are taken for granted and snubbed
The candidates don’t hear from California voters about the acute water troubles in our state. But they’re lobbied about manufacturing declines in Michigan and Pennsylvania. It’s an old cliche and true: Squeaky wheels get the government grease.
It’s not the electoral college, per se, that’s the culprit. It’s how the electoral votes are awarded by the states. They’re parceled out on a winner-take-all basis. If a candidate carries a state by one vote or 1 million, it’s irrelevant. All the state’s electoral votes go to the popular vote winner.
Two small states — Nebraska and Maine — are exceptions. They partially award electoral votes based on who wins in congressional districts. That makes more sense than strict winner-take-all.
In California, at least 5.9 million people voted for Republican Trump. They might as well have used their ballots for fireplace kindling. All 54 of the state’s electoral votes will be awarded to Democrat Kamala Harris, who received roughly 9.1 million votes. (When the final count is in, the vote totals will increase slightly.)
Same thing in Texas, only vice versa. There, 4.8 million people voted for Harris. But all 40 electoral votes are going to Trump, who was supported by 6.4 million people.
Republican voters were effectively disenfranchised in California, as Democrats were in Texas.
Polling has shown that the overwhelming majority of Americans — including Californians — want to junk the electoral college system and elect the president by popular vote.
A September survey by the Pew Research Center found that 63% of Americans prefer that the presidency be decided by the national popular vote.
Conservative Republicans, however, like the status quo — no doubt because two GOP candidates in recent years have won the presidency while losing the popular vote: Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000.
But junking the electoral college entirely won’t happen any time soon because it’s politically impossible. It would require a constitutional amendment. And that would need a two-thirds vote by each house of Congress — both about to be controlled by the GOP — plus ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures.
Red state politicians won’t sign off because Republican candidates benefit from the current nonsense. Neither would purple states because they enjoy all the attention and campaign bucks as “battlegrounds.”
But there’s a way to reform the system and still retain the electoral college. Just change how the electoral votes are awarded. Parcel them out in proportion to each candidate’s popular vote in the state.
In California, Harris got roughly 59% of the vote and Trump 38%. Minority candidates picked up 3%, but I’d shift their tiny amount to the major contenders for electoral vote purposes. Harris would wind up with 33 and Trump with 21.
In Texas, Trump would win 23 electoral votes and Harris 17.
A proportional allocation system “would make sure that every vote counts and lessen the likelihood that the candidate who loses the popular vote will become president,” UC Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in a recent Sacramento Bee op-ed.
Besides Trump and Bush, three presidents were elected in the 1880s while losing the popular vote: John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison.
“The electoral college was based on the framers’ distrust of majority rule and was a tremendous boost to slave states’ political power,” Chemerinsky told me.
The South fretted about the North’s larger population and the Yankees’ political clout. So the founders compromised. Slaves wouldn’t be allowed to vote, but they could count as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning members of the House of Representatives based on population.
That strengthened the South in the electoral college because a state’s number of electors is based mostly on the size of its House delegation. But every state also gets an elector for each senator. And each state is entitled to two, regardless of its size — an allotment designed to dilute the power of big states.
I didn’t do all the math, but it’s a safe assumption that Trump still would have won the electoral college vote under a proportional allocation system.
Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar, believes the reform could be passed by Congress without amending the Constitution.
But first, Americans would need to insist that they elect the president, not the states.
LAKEPORT, Calif. — Maria Valadez would like everyone to chill out.
Every election, the prickly Lake County registrar follows California’s litany of voting laws and certifies thousands of ballots by the time she is required to. And every year, people still complain.
“The state gave us a deadline, we meet the deadline,” an exasperated Valadez said from her small office in Lakeport as a handful of staffers sat at computers verifying signatures more than two weeks after election day, when they had tallied fewer than half of the votes. “I just don’t understand, why do we need to rush?”
In a state known for its slow processing of election results, Lake County, with only about 38,000 voters, is often the slowest of them all.
Ballots ready for processing at the Lake County registrar’s office in Lakeport.
For years, the rural Northern California county — known for local disputes over marijuana cultivation and several brutal wildfires — has been among the state’s last to announce votes after elections, often frustrating candidates and befuddling political pundits.
The reason appears to be a combination of factors, including an under-resourced elections budget in one of California’s smaller, lower-income counties and a desire to keep a meticulous, steady process that was instilled by trusted staff decades ago, even as technology advances.
“Elections are a lot of security, transparency and accountability. That’s what we do here. And it has been like this for all of the years I’ve worked here,” said Valadez, who was hired in 1995 and trained by the prior registrar, who was hired in 1977. “We have a lot of checks and balances. We do them as we go.”
She repeated: “We have a deadline, we meet the deadline.”
State law requires counties to finalize their official results 30 days after the election, this year by Dec. 5. Though Valadez is adamant that she’ll make it, the pace of progress is startling compared to most of the country. Shortly before midnight on election night, Lake County reported just 5,784 ballots. A few thousand more have been counted since. Yet by Thursday — 16 days after the election — Lake County still had more than 10,000 ballots left to count, according to the secretary of state.
Workers process ballots at the Lake County registrar’s office, which is slower than many others in submitting final election results.
“I’m not unsympathetic to the challenges that come with unfunded top-down mandates from Sacramento, but there is a pattern of sheer awfulness with Lake County in particular going back at least a decade and they’ve earned all the scorn coming their way,” Rob Pyers, who operates the election guide California Target Book, said on social media last week.
He said Lake County is “in the running for slowest election department worldwide.”
This year, that may not matter much. Unlike some other counties in California, where daily ballot counts are still changing results in tight races for the House of Representatives that will determine the size of Republicans’ majority in Washington, Lake County did not have many hot contests on the ballot.
Still, the slow count means residents are waiting to find out who will serve on local schools boards, the Clear Lake City Council and the county board of supervisors.
Lake County’s lag has delayed statewide outcomes before.
In the 2014 primary election, the race for state controller was razor thin. California voters had to wait a month to know who would compete in the general election as Lake County officials took their time with the final ballots even as they were barraged with phone calls from politicos feverishly refreshing their browsers for updates.
Lakeport is the county seat of Lake County, which is often the slowest of all California counties to report election results.
It was Lake County that declared Betty Yee had edged out fellow Democrat John Perez by fewer than 500 votes and would advance. The county met its deadline. Democracy lived on.
Now, it’s a different world than when Valadez first started working in elections 30 years ago, and her department’s speed — or lack thereof — has spurred conspiracy theories like those inflamed by Donald Trump when he lost the election in 2020.
As Valadez and her staff calmly processed ballots Wednesday, an angry man from North Dakota called to inquire about what’s taking so long.
Conservatives have singled out Lake County on social media as proof that deep blue California is aiming to rig elections. The man who lives 1,600 miles east and can’t vote in Lake County suggested something nefarious was going on.
Valadez invited him to visit her office off the shore of Clear Lake, to her tightknit community where the security guard at the courthouse next door calls entrants “kiddo.” She has nothing to hide, she said.
“We take our job very seriously,” Valadez said of her small staff. “The integrity of my work is very important to me.”
Lake County Registrar Maria Valadez at work in her office in Lakeport.
California is among the slowest states to call elections not only because of its huge population, but also because of voting laws designed to increase voter participation, including sending all registered voters a ballot by mail, which can prolong when some races are called.
“California deserves all the scorn it gets for holding up House election results,” screamed a headline last week in the New York Post. The article went on:
“Hey, bud, what’s the rush? seems to be Golden State officials’ work ethic.”
Derek Tisler, who focuses on elections as counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, confirmed that Lake County is among the slowest to process ballots in the U.S. this year. But that’s OK, he said.
“We get impatient, but I think everyone would agree that at the end of the day, we want things to be accurate,” Tisler said. “That is what election officials are going to prioritize. It makes sense they’re doing things in a way that they feel confident in.”
As a wall of rain beat down this week on most of Lake County, a place that struggles with meth and opioid abuse, where 73% of public school students qualify for free and reduced-price meals, Valadez said she’s doing her best “within staffing and resource limitations.”
Jim Emenegger processes ballots at the Lake County Registrar of Voters office.
The Lake County registrar’s office has five full time-employees, and one is currently on leave. A few retirees have been added as temporary help. The county — population: 67,000 — does not have a machine to verify signatures, instead verifying them manually.
Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said places like Lake County don’t get the same resources as bigger tourism destinations with urban centers and higher property taxes. The state does not help counties pay for elections staff or voting equipment even as it issues more mandates, she said, making local officials’ jobs harder and uneven, depending on where they live.
“I get really frustrated when I hear lawmakers complaining about how long it takes to count, because they could actually do something about it,” Alexander said. “If elections were not a chronically underfunded government service, we could have faster results.”
Valadez also pointed to voting preferences as a potential reason for the timing of the county’s results. Unlike a growing number of counties, Lake County does not offer voting centers, a hybrid model that allows voters to drop off ballots several days before the election.
Voters here prefer to vote in person at their neighborhood polling precincts and some are still getting used to receiving a ballot in the mail, Valadez said.
But even if Lake County got a boost in funding, and more voters sent their ballots in by mail early, it’s unclear if elections officials would change much of their decades-old strategy.
Diane Fridley and Jim Emenegger process ballots at the Lake County registrar’s office.
Wearing a bright red pixie cut and a Carhartt flanel, Diane Fridley, 71, worked to verify votes this week at a computer in the registrar’s office in Lakeport, scrolling her mouse across the screen to identify any issues with ballots.
For more than 40 years, Fridley was the Lake County registrar. When she retired in 2019, she passed the torch to Valadez. But in between babysitting her grandchildren, Fridley comes in to help around election season.
A Lake County native, Fridley remembers when voters had to bring their birth certificates to their polling stations. She has lived through the days of hanging chads. As someone who likes to have the same breakfast every morning — a slice of apple pie — and is hypervigilant about counting ballots, all the changes have been hard, but exciting.
“Yeah, it takes us a little longer, but we dot our I’s and we cross our Ts,” she said. “We’re positive whatever totals we have are correct. I’m not saying other counties don’t do that, but we try to be perfect.”
Fridley and Valadez exchanged a knowing look.
“There’s a deadline for a reason,” Fridley said, echoing Valadez. “We always meet the deadline.”
On the afternoon of Oct. 12, 2017, a nurse at Kaiser Permanente called the Monterey Police Department to report that a patient had come in for a sexual assault exam.
The woman, the nurse told police, said she had been sexually assaulted four days earlier while at a Republican women’s conference at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Spa in the coastal California resort town.
The alleged assailant — though his name wouldn’t be revealed immediately — was a popular Fox News Channel host and the keynote speaker at the conference.
The woman, identified only as Jane Doe in police reports, told the nurse she wasn’t sure she wanted to involve authorities and didn’t want to disclose the person’s name at that point. She had been suffering from nightmares and bouts of sobbing after returning home from the conference, but had little memory of the sexual encounter. She feared she had been drugged. The woman, who has not been identified publicly, could not be reached for comment by The Times.
The nurse referred the woman to an emergency room for a sexual assault forensic exam. But the nurse’s call — made as a mandated reporter — triggered a law enforcement probe that included interviews with hotel staff, a review of surveillance video, discussions with several of the woman’s associates and a conversation with the alleged perpetrator, Pete Hegseth, who assured police the encounter had been consensual.
No charges were ever filed. Monterey County Dist. Atty. Jeannine M. Pacioni said no charges were supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The two parties eventually reached a private settlement, after which Doe signed a nondisclosure agreement.
The story seemed to end there — until Donald Trump nominated Hegseth to be Defense secretary. Now that night in Monterey has become the centerpiece in what could be one of the most contentious confirmation fights in years.
In recent days, a police report on the incident and other details have offered a clearer picture about the allegations. But much remains unknown, including why local prosecutors decided not to file charges against Hegseth.
Shortly after the president-elect’s announcement of Hegseth’s nomination, a friend of the woman wrote a memo to Trump’s transition team saying that Hegseth had raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer in his hotel room in the early morning hours following a banquet dinner at the California Federation of Republican Women conference.
In response, Hegseth confirmed the financial settlement, saying through his lawyer that he had agreed to pay the woman to protect his job at Fox. But he vehemently denied committing assault. The woman, Hegseth’s lawyer said in a statement, “was the aggressor in initiating sexual activity.” Hegseth had been “visibly intoxicated” at the after-party in the hotel bar, the lawyer said, and the woman had “led him by the arm to his hotel room.”
“The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared, and that’s where I’m gonna leave it,” Hegseth told reporters at the Capitol on Thursday.
Revelations of the incident have set off a firestorm, both in Washington and among the members of the California Federation of Republican Women.
Pete Hegseth
(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)
The federation, which is a nonprofit advocacy group, is an organization comprised mostly of retirees. Its members gather for luncheons, conferences and fundraisers to hear Republican politicians speak about conservative issues.
Many in the group were horrified that a beloved conservative Republican Cabinet pick could be hurt by allegations.
“This thing is so f— bogus,” one of the organization’s officers yelled before hanging up on a Times reporter who called for comment.
This week, the Monterey Police Department released a redacted 22-page report detailing its investigation, including accounts of the recollections of Doe and Hegseth, along with several other attendees. Though police reports are typically not public in California, the document had been released because Hegseth had previously asked for a copy.
The police report offers the most complete picture yet of what occurred at the Monterey hotel on Oct. 7 and 8.
On the second day of the three-day gathering, Doe took a break in her hotel room where she was staying with her husband and at least one of her small children before the banquet dinner and keynote speech — the last major scheduled event of the conference — began at 6 p.m., according to text messages and sources with knowledge of the event.
Forty-five minutes later she texted with her husband from the banquet. The conversation turned to Hegseth.
“Our ladies are freaking drooling over him,” she wrote. She sent a photo of Hegseth standing at a podium holding a microphone and gesturing with his hand as he spoke.
“He doesn’t look even remotely familiar,” she said. “But apparently all the women know who he is.”
She continued: “He wears a ring on his pointer finger. It creeps me out.” She lamented that the event was taking so long.
After the banquet, the woman went to an after-party in another federation member’s hotel suite, where she had a glass of champagne. Hegseth was there too. A federation member who was there told police later that the woman “did not seem intoxicated, but had a buzz” at the event.
Around midnight, Doe, Hegseth and a second woman walked toward Knuckles, the sports bar in the hotel. Inside the bar, which has since closed, televisions and football helmets lined the walls. She texted her husband an update, saying that she was headed to the bar with a group of ladies. “Omg I have so much to tell you. This Pete dude is a … toooool,” she wrote.
While they were drinking at the bar, Hegseth allegedly put his hand on another woman’s knee. She told police that she made it clear it was “not acceptable,” but he still invited her to his room. She declined, according to the report.
Monterey’s Cannery Row
(Zen Rial/Getty Images)
The same woman tried to get Doe’s attention so she could act as a “crotch blocker” to deter Hegseth’s sexual advances, according to the report.
Doe told police that her memory started to get “fuzzy” while she was at the bar.
Around 1:30 a.m., Doe argued with Hegseth near the hotel pool about his behavior with women at the conference. He responded that he was a “nice guy,” according to the report. She later told investigators that Hegseth would rub women on their legs and she thought his actions were inappropriate.
A hotel employee who had been working that night told an investigator that guests had called the front desk to complain about two people causing a disturbance by the swimming pool about 1:30 a.m. The employee said that when he approached Hegseth and Doe, Hegseth cursed at him and said that he “had freedom of speech.” The woman intervened and said that “they were Republicans and apologized for Hegseth’s actions,” the report states.
The staffer said the woman was “standing on her own and very coherent,” while Hegseth was “very intoxicated,” according to the report.
Doe placed her hand and arm on Hegseth’s back and escorted him toward the building where his room was, the employee told police. Hegseth later told an investigator he didn’t remember being chastised by the pool.
In the early morning hours, Doe’s husband sent her a text message: “Holy smokes lady…I don’t remember the last time you were socializing at nearly 2:00 a.m.” She responded, “Hahaha I know. I gotta make sure that to” — ending midsentence — and then stopped texting.
Her husband wrote back: “Doing ok? My love? Worried about you.”
Around 2 a.m. her husband went looking for Doe at Knuckles but no one was there, he told investigators.
Doe next recalled being in a hotel room alone with Hegseth. She had her phone in her hand and Hegseth asked her who she was texting before taking her phone, she told police. She tried to leave the room, according to the report, but Hegseth blocked the door. She remembered saying “no” a lot, she told police.
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of Defense, speaks with reporters in Washington on Thursday.
(Rod Lamkey/Associated Press)
Her next memory, she told police, was lying on a bed or couch with Hegseth’s dog tags hovering over her face. She said he ejaculated on her stomach, threw a towel at her and said to “clean it up” before asking her whether she was OK, according to the report.
Hegseth recalled the situation differently in an interview with authorities.
He told police that Doe led him to his hotel room, where things progressed between the two of them, according to the report. There was “always” conversation and “always” consensual contact between himself and Doe, he told police.
Hegseth recalled Doe displaying “early signs of regret” after the incident and said she would tell her husband she fell asleep on a couch in someone else’s room, according to the report.
Around 4 a.m., Doe returned to her hotel room and explained to her husband that she “must have fallen asleep.” She told police she didn’t start remembering what happened between her and Hegseth until she returned home the next day.
The Los Angeles Unified School District showed strong gains in newly released state metrics and reached a record graduation rate, but overall academic performance fell well short of state learning goals.
The latest release of state data indicated positive trends for the state’s largest school system, with improvement that outpaced the state as a whole.
In absolute terms, however, the performance of L.A. Unified is middling, even as depicted by a state accountability system that rarely shows school systems in a harsh light.
“LAUSD scores are on an upward trend, but the initial goal needs to be to attain results that meet or exceed LAUSD pre-pandemic levels,” said Michael W. Kirst, former state Board of Education president and a Stanford emeritus professor of education and business administration. “For example, there are some test-score results that meet this goal. I am less interested now in how they compare to the rest of the state on dashboard indicators. That will be more relevant in subsequent years.”
The district’s highest-rated metric was for its suspension rate, which scored the state’s best color rating of blue — indicating that the L.A. Unified has successfully slashed the number of students sent home from school for disciplinary reasons.
This figure — combined with rising test scores — is genuinely positive news because it suggests that even the more challenging students are improving and remaining in class to take the state tests, rather than being hidden during the testing window via suspensions.
The district also received a green or “good” rating for its graduation rate of 87% — a record for L.A. Unified.
This figure is more challenging to interpret because graduation rates have soared across the nation even as other indicators of academic achievement have not kept pace. In essence, school systems across the country have finally figured out how to get most students to graduation. And this is important: Graduates are eligible for higher education and have better job prospects.
However, experts have questioned whether academic standards have been sacrificed in the process. And many students enter college with learning gaps that make success there harder to achieve.
All the same, L.A. Unified’s graduation rate is rising faster than in the state as a whole — a consistent theme for L.A. Unified.
In the category of test scores for math and English language arts, L.A. Unified received a yellow rating, which is less than good, but better than the state’s worse overall rating of orange.
When it comes to the rate at which students miss school, both the state and L.A. Unified fell into the yellow ranking.
L.A. Unified Supt. Alberto Carvalho categorized the results as “historic,” while a district release called them “unprecedented.”
Carvalho announced the latest data at Jefferson High, where he alluded to a hit song from 1960 by former Jefferson student Etta James.
“Today, at last, as Etta James would say, the story actually gets better,” Carvalho said. “And at last, we can say that once again, Los Angeles Unified has overpowered, outperformed, other urban districts across the state” —including, he said, those with lower poverty rates and fewer students who are learning English.
Every school system tends to highlight the data in the best way possible.
San Diego Unified, for example, spotlighted overall achievement levels rather than rate of improvement in comparison to other school systems. Through this lens, San Diego Unified outranked L.A. Unified in every major category other than suspension rates.
Long Beach Unified could point to better overall scores in the most closely tracked categories of math and English, though it trailed L.A. Unified in other areas.
A sobering overall assessment of state progress came from the Oakland-based advocacy group EdTrust-West.
“While some of the new data [indicate] sustained progress, particularly steady reductions in chronic absenteeism, other improvements are gains in name only,” the group said in a statement. “We should not celebrate improvements of a single percentage point — or less — because they don’t tell the real story: that yet another year has gone by for Californian students of color and multilingual learners, and not enough has changed.”
For academic ratings, the state uses an obscure system called “distance from standard,” which averages all test scores and compares that number to a figure that represents “meeting the standard.”
Thus, in math, L.A. Unified is 60.4 points below standard, but is up by 6.9 points from the year before, which is considered a strong one-year improvement.
A more accessible measure, though also imperfect, is proficiency rate, which is the percentage of students who have met the state academic standard in a particular area. These figures, which were previously released, show that L.A. Unified has far to go.
43% of L.A. Unified students met grade-level standards in English, up 1.8 percentage points. Statewide, 47% of students are proficient in English.
In math, 32.8% of Los Angeles students met standards, up 2.3 percentage points from 2023 scores. Statewide, 35.5% of student are proficient.
L.A. Unified proficiency rates in science reached 24%, up 1.8 percentage from 2023. Statewide it’s 30.7%.
“LAUSD students are bouncing back from learning lost during the pandemic,” said UC Berkeley education Professor Bruce Fuller. “But their recovery is unfolding at a sluggish pace in reading and math.”
Fuller added, “The recovery does renew the steady progress made in the two decades prior to COVID-19. Still, L.A. students read a grade level below the average California pupil, as early as the fourth grade,” according to national tests.
Toward the end of the news conference, Carvalho acknowledged the less positive numbers.
“Do we have more work to do? Absolutely. Are we satisfied? Absolutely not,” Carvalho said. “Our static proficiency is still low, but our rate of improvement is phenomenal compared to everyone else’s.”
Carvalho and Deputy Supt. Karla Estrada pointed to several effective strategies. The superintendent said that summer school increased the graduation rate from 86% to 87% as seniors were able to complete required course work.
The location of the news conference at Jefferson High, south of downtown, was no accident. In the distance-from-standard measure, Jefferson had huge jumps — 20 points in math, 47 in English — even though overall scores remained low.
Jefferson is one of more than 120 “priority schools” in the district that receive extra resources and monthly evaluations and data analysis.
In an interview, Principal Kristine Puich described strategies that included aligning conference periods by grade level and topic so teachers could plan together and compare results.
The district provided a specialist in training teachers on strategies to help English learners, many of whom attend Jefferson. The school has about 100 newcomers to the United States.
The district also has assigned a special cadre of substitutes to Jefferson so they could become familiar with the students there. These substitutes work in regular classrooms as a second teacher when they are not needed as subs.
Teachers also have received special training in how to analyze data and adapt lessons in response.
For a third time, lawyers for Sean “Diddy” Combs urged a judge Friday to grant the hip-hop mogul $50 million bail, this time saying he should be placed in home confinement in a three-bedroom New York City apartment on the Upper East Side with 24-hour surveillance.
Federal prosecutors, however, said Combs violated the rules in a federal lockup and “cannot be trusted” outside with contacting witnesses. They also alleged that he was a “danger to others.”
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian delayed a decision until next week.
Combs’ legal team told the judge that it was proposing conditions “far more restrictive” than Combs faces in jail, including limiting phone calls to only his attorneys, prohibiting visitors other than a handful of lawyers and named family members, and requiring 24-hour security by an independent firm with a bar on contacting witnesses or potential witnesses. Previously, the defense had proposed Combs’ Miami mansion for home detention, but the judge rejected that Friday because it has a dock and access to the water.
Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution. He and associates are accused of luring female victims, often under the pretense of a romantic relationship, and using force, threats, coercion and drugs to get them to engage in sex acts with male prostitutes in what Combs referred to as “freak-offs.” He has been in federal detention for more than 60 days since his arrest.
Federal prosecutors reiterated their opposition to Combs being granted bail, alleging that he attempted to tamper with witnesses and influence potential jurors.
Prosecutors said that in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he is being held, Combs had flouted rules regarding communications and phones and was orchestrating contact with witnesses to buy himself out of the case with false testimony. The prosecutor said he was a “danger to others” who only needs to reach one juror.
The judge asked prosecutors to address why Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Michael Jeffries was able to get $10-million bail on an indictment for sex trafficking and prostitution business but not Combs.
Combs’s lawyers noted that Jeffries allegedly paid for dozens of men to travel within the United States and internationally to meet him and his co-defendants to engage in commercial sex acts. Jeffries is also accused of using a security company to surveil and intimidate witnesses who threatened to expose his misconduct, yet the government agreed to his home detention.
Federal prosecutors, however, argued in court and a two-page letter to the judge that the cases are materially different for multiple reasons. While Jeffries is accused of using force, fraud, and coercion to engage men in non-consensual sex, he is not facing the additional racketeering, firearms and violence-related charges that Combs is.
Combs is charged with leading an enterprise with a persistent pattern of racketeering activity from 2008 to 2024 that included Combs and his co-conspirators engaging in kidnapping, arson, and forced labor.
Combs’ alleged criminal conduct, a prosecutor told the judge, was more similar to high-profile sex-crime cases where defendants were kept in custody, as with NXIVM leader Keith Raniere, Larry Ray and R. Kelly.
Combs’ lawyers also argued that the government distorted the now-infamous security video of Combs assaulting then-girlfriend Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura at the Intercontinental Hotel in Los Angeles. A prosecutor said they used the version that was first shown on CNN because they didn’t want Combs or his attorneys to be able to identify the source of the video and retaliate.
The judge gave prosecutors and Combs’ attorneys until Monday to submit information about Combs’ communications from jail — a recent sticking point in the case — before he makes a bail decision.
What appeared to be a high-rise fire near 5th and Bixel streets in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday night caught the attention of a group of young people, who quickly began recording the disaster unfolding before them to share on social media.
The video was livestreamed on Citizen, a public safety mobile app, which was then posted on the Citizen app’s social media account on X. The video shows smoke billowing from the top of the building and an orange glow. The video was posted under the headline “#Breaking News Fire in Downtown High-Rise. Flames and smoke are billowing from the top floors of the structure. Avoid the area.”
Video caught on Citizen App show a burning building that the Los Angeles Fire Dept. confirmed as a movie shoot and nor an actual fire. (Citizen App)
“You can smell it,” a woman from the group can be heard saying. “You can smell, like, the paper burning inside… I smell burnt paper.”
“This is crazy,” the young man recording says.
But the fire was not a real disaster, the group soon learned. It was Hollywood make believe, a phony fire created for the filming of a movie.
In fact the building at 1201 W. 5th St. belongs to the Los Angeles Center Studios, a 20-acre studio campus that includes event venues and six 18,000-square-foot sound stages among other amenities, according to its website.
The fake fire was so believable that the Los Angeles Fire Department had to put out the word on social media, urging residents not to call them to report it.
“We were letting them know it was a movie set and there was no danger,” said fire department spokesperson Margaret Stewart.
On the social media site X, the department wrote:
“We appreciate the concerned citizens calling but — the fire visible on the roof of 1201 W 5th by Bixel in [downtown L.A.] is not real – it is part of a movie/tv shoot. It is planned to be active until 3 a.m. Please share the word!”
Stewart said it was easy to think it was a real fire because camera crews were at the top of the building and not visible.
As the group of young people who videotaped the fabricated fire continued to watch the building that night they began to deduce that the fire was perhaps not real. The smoke was white, the fire was not spreading and they heard no crackling or popping sounds that fires make.
Commentators watching the livestream typed responses on the Citizen app, noting that the fire was part of a movie set.
“It’s not a real fire folks,” a viewer wrote which the young man recording read out loud. “It’s Hollywood magic.”
The group who videotaped the scene, embarrassed, laugh at the situation, expressing relief that they are not identified in the video.
“Whatever. They don’t see our faces,” one of the women says.
A magnitude 3.8 earthquake brought weak shaking to Malibu and Los Angeles’ Westside Friday.
The epicenter was about 4.6 miles north of Point Dume, in the mountains above Malibu’s city limits. It’s the seventh earthquake so far this year to rumble in this area.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “weak” shaking — or Level 3 as defined by the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale — may have been felt in Malibu, Thousand Oaks, Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Canoga Park, Winnetka and Reseda.
Shaking of that intensity is generally quite noticeable indoors, especially on upper floors, and can cause idled vehicles to rock slightly.
Weak shaking considered Level 2 on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale may have been felt across the rest of the San Fernando Valley, Santa Monica and across the Los Angeles Basin. That intensity of shaking is felt by only a few people at rest, especially on an upper floor of a building.
In Mar Vista, shaking could be felt for 10 to 15 seconds on the second floor of a building, feeling as if someone had kicked a desk and made it wobble.
Friday’s epicenter was about three-fifths of a mile northeast of a considerably larger, magnitude 4.7 earthquake that struck on Sept. 12. That quake was powerful enough to send Malibu’s mayor and his wife diving under their kitchen table, and startled anchors broadcasting live at KABC-TV and KTTV-TV.
Friday’s epicenter was also about six miles northeast of a magnitude 4.6 earthquake that struck on Feb. 9, with an epicenter within Malibu’s city limits. That earthquake reportedly was strong enough to toss items off a counter and cause a wall to crack.
By seismologist Lucy Jones’ count, Southern California has experienced 15 independent seismic sequences so far this year in which there have been at least one magnitude 4 or higher earthquake. That’s the highest annual total in the last 65 years, surpassing the 13 seen in 1988.
The active seismic year, however, doesn’t provide a clue as to when Los Angeles County’s next major, damaging earthquake will strike. L.A. County’s last such quake was 30 years ago, when a magnitude 6.7 earthquake centered in the San Fernando Valley caused at least 57 deaths and left more than 7,000 injured, about 20,000 homeless and more than 40,000 buildings damaged.
Southern California’s last megaquake occurred in 1857, when an earthquake with a magnitude of around 7.8 ruptured about 225 miles of the San Andreas fault between Monterey County and San Bernardino County.
Are you ready for when the Big One hits? Get ready for the next major earthquake by signing up for our Unshaken newsletter, which breaks down emergency preparedness into bite-sized steps over six weeks. Learn more about earthquake kits, which apps you need, Lucy Jones’ most important advice and more at latimes.com/Unshaken.
