The robbery from a GardaWorld warehouse on Easter Sunday was like something from a movie – and police appear to be puzzled by how it went down
It was a Tinseltown heist that belonged in a movie.
A gang of audacious thieves struck at night, dodged security measures like ghosts in the night and disappeared with a staggering $30m in cash in a record-breaking robbery that played out for real on Los Angeles’s streets, not the fevered script of a thriller writer.
Continue reading...Three police officers charged with involuntary manslaughter in death of Mario Gonzalez, whom they held down on the ground
Three California police officers have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 killing of a man they restrained in a prone position for five minutes until he lost consciousness.
Pamela Price, Alameda county district attorney, announced the charges on Thursday, three years after the asphyxia death of Mario Gonzalez, 26. The officers, Eric McKinley, James Fisher and Cameron Leahy, face up to four years in prison.
Continue reading...Officer shot and killed both a man who was attacking customers and Valentina Orellana-Peralta, who was hiding in a dressing room
A Los Angeles police officer who fatally shot a 14-year-old girl inside a clothing store in 2021 will not face charges, the California attorney general announced on Wednesday.
Valentina Orellana-Peralta was shopping with her mother at a north Hollywood Burlington Coat Factory on 23 December 2021 when the LAPD entered to apprehend a man suspected of attacking customers in the store. When officer William Dorsey Jones Jr fired three rounds at the man, Valentina was in a nearby dressing room with her mother praying and was killed by Jones’s gunfire.
Continue reading...Region near Tulare Lake has been put on ‘probation’ as overpumping of water has caused faster sinking of ground
Even after two back-to-back wet years, California’s water wars are far from over. On Tuesday, state water officials took an unprecedented step to intervene in the destructive pumping of depleted groundwater in the state’s sprawling agricultural heartland.
The decision puts a farming region known as the Tulare Lake groundwater subbasin, which includes roughly 837-sq-miles in the rural San Joaquin valley, on “probation” in accordance with a sustainable groundwater use law passed a decade ago. Large water users will face fees and state oversight of their pumping.
Continue reading...Asna Tabassum says university is ‘succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice’ after decision to scrap speech
The University of Southern California is facing intense backlash for the decision to cancel the valedictorian speech of a Muslim student at the commencement ceremony in May, a decision which the student has criticized as being silenced by anti-Palestinian hatred for her views on human rights.
In a missive to the USC community, the university’s provost, Andrew Guzman, wrote that the Los Angeles university took the unprecedented step of canceling Asna Tabassum’s planned speech because the “alarming tenor” of reactions to her selection as valedictorian – along with “the intensity of feelings” surrounding Israel’s ongoing military strikes in Gaza – had created “substantial risks relating to security”.
Continue reading...The Piper PA-32, a single engine plane, crashed off the coast across from Trump’s LA golf club in Ranchos Palos Verdes
A pilot and his dog survived a plane crash off the California coast, swimming to shore where they were met by authorities responding to the incident.
A 911 call came in on Sunday afternoon at 5.22pm about a plane crashing into the ocean off the coast across from the Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles, in Ranchos Palos Verdes, the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department said on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Public spending on private sweep contractors is soaring across the state – and unhoused people allege poor treatment
This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the Wayne Barrett Project
On an October morning, a small army arrived to evict Rudy Ortega from his home in the Crash Zone, an encampment located near the end of the airport runway in San Jose, California, Silicon Valley’s largest city. As jets roared overhead, garbage trucks and police squad cars encircled Ortega’s hand-built shelter. Heavy machinery operators stood by for the signal to bulldoze Ortega’s camp.
Continue reading...Chance Brannon firebombed a Planned Parenthood clinic in 2022 and had plans to attack a power station and a Pride celebration
A former US marine was sentenced on Monday to nine years in prison for firebombing a southern California Planned Parenthood clinic in 2022, federal prosecutors said.
Chance Brannon, 24, pleaded guilty in November to four felony counts, including malicious destruction of property by fire as well as explosives and intentional damage to a reproductive health services facility.
Continue reading...Since 2021, eight employees of Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, charged with assaulting female prisoners
The US Bureau of Prisons (BoP) is closing a federal women’s prison in California that has been plagued by rampant staff sexual abuse of incarcerated residents.
Colette Peters, the BoP director, said in a statement to the Associated Press on Monday that Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin was “not meeting expected standards and that the best course of action is to close the facility”.
Continue reading...Tech giant is protesting proposed law that would require large online platforms to pay ‘journalism usage fee’
Google has temporarily blocked links from local news outlets in California from appearing in search results in response to the advancement of a bill that would require tech companies to pay publications for links that articles share. The change applies only to some people using Google in California, though it is not clear how many.
The California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) would require large online platforms to pay a “journalism usage fee” for linking to news sites based in the Golden state. The bill cleared the California assembly in 2023. To become law, it would need to pass in the Senate before being signed by the governor, Gavin Newsom.
Continue reading...Shayne Sutherland, 29, died in California after being held face down, a year before a law banned maneuvers that lead to asphyxia
The city of Stockton, California, has agreed to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Shayne Sutherland, a 29-year-old who died after being held face down by police officers in 2020, for $6m, the family’s attorneys announced Thursday.
Sutherland’s mother, Karen Sutherland, said that nothing can replace her son, but that the settlement feels like an acknowledgement of responsibility from Stockton police, which she had been hoping for.
Continue reading...Danielle Johnson reportedly tossed infant and nine-year-old out of moving SUV after killing Jaelen Chaney, and then died by suicide
An infant girl and her nine-year-old sister who were found on a busy Los Angeles-area freeway were thrown from a moving SUV, and investigators believe their mother was responsible and died by suicide after also killing her partner, authorities said Tuesday.
The eight-month-old was pronounced dead at the scene early on Monday, and the older girl was taken to the hospital for moderate injuries, according to law enforcement officials.
Continue reading...William Woods was sent to a mental institution because Matthew Keirans – who faces 32 years in prison – stole his name for decades
William Woods was homeless and living in Los Angeles when he learned that someone was racking up debt using his name.
But when he reported his concerns to the branch manager of a bank, he wound up spending nearly two years locked up, accused of identity theft himself. As he continued to insist he was Woods in a desperate effort to clear his name, he was even sent to a state mental hospital and drugged, court records show.
Continue reading...Communities in Washington, California and Maine will receive $755,000 under the Infrastructure Act to build climate resilience
This month, three Indigenous American tribes on the west and east coasts will collectively receive nearly $755,000 in federal funding to manage ocean and coastal problems, as well as engage in partnerships to offset the effects of climate crisis in their regions. The tribes’ projects will blend together Indigenous knowledge and scientific data to build innovative strategies around coastal resilience.
On Monday, the federal agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), and the US Department of Commerce announced that the Makah Tribe in Washington, the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians in California and the Penobscot Nation in Maine will be individually awarded between $200,000 and $290,000 for their two-year projects. The funding comes from the Biden administration’s bipartisan Infrastructure Act, which provided Noaa with nearly $3bn to facilitate environmental stewardship, build climate-resilient coasts and support infrastructure around weather forecasting from 2022 to 2026.
Continue reading...Stephanie Cosme, 32, was killed last year when she inadvertently walked into the rotating propeller of an aircraft in California
A US air force civilian contractor had become disoriented recording data at an airport in California last year when she walked into a jet’s rotating propeller and was killed, officials said Friday.
In a statement outlining the findings of a report into the contractor’s death, the air force materiel command said that 32-year-old Stephanie Cosme was mortally injured on 7 September when she inadvertently walked into the rotating propeller of an MQ-9A that was parked at Gray Butte airfield.
Continue reading...Although one Bay Area reporter found the side-eye inappropriate, New York earthquake Twitter proved delightful for Angelenos
For many people in Los Angeles, earthquakes are just another trend that New Yorkers have discovered years after the real cool kids did.
As Angelenos awoke to the news that the east coast had endured a 4.8-magnitude earthquake centered in New Jersey, “First time?” memes filled Los Angeles social media channels.
Continue reading...Dog that had gone missing was discovered in Michigan clean and well-fed: ‘Whoever had her took good care of her’
Nearly nine months after his disappearance, a dog that had gone missing in California was discovered more than 2,000 miles away in Michigan.
A resident in Harper Woods, a Detroit suburb, contacted police in late March to report a stray dog in her neighborhood. Police collected the terrier mix, named Mishka, and brought her to an animal welfare group.
Continue reading...One of the largest cash heists in the city’s history went unnoticed until police opened vault that few people knew about
Thieves in Los Angeles pulled off one of the largest cash heists in city history over the weekend, stealing as much as $30m from a money storage facility on Easter Sunday, authorities said on Wednesday.
The break-in unfolded at an unnamed facility in the Sylmar area of the San Fernando Valley that handles and stores cash from businesses across the region. Burglars were able to enter without immediate detection and breached a safe, said Elaine Morales, a Los Angeles police department commander, to the Los Angeles Times.
Continue reading...Boy, as yet unidentified, is third child killed by San Bernardino law enforcement in less than two years and second in under a month
Southern California sheriff’s deputies shot and killed a 17-year-old boy with mental health issues after he armed himself with a knife and locked himself inside a bathroom at a home, authorities said Wednesday.
The teen was being transferred from a hospital, where he had been treated after cutting himself, to a mental health facility when he escaped on Tuesday, the San Bernardino county sheriff Shannon Dicus said.
Continue reading...Revealed: Savannah Graziano, 15, shot by sheriff’s deputies in 2022 while unarmed and following instructions to move toward them
Newly released law enforcement footage captures the moment California police fatally shot an unarmed 15-year-old girl who was a reported kidnapping victim.
On 27 September 2022, San Bernardino county sheriff’s deputies were searching for Savannah Graziano, who was feared abducted by her father Anthony Graziano after he had fatally shot her mother the day before.
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