Los Angeles

How yall doing?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1457493

Los Angeles police have arrested a man suspected of stabbing a Metro bus driver Thursday afternoon in Venice.

The driver was behind the wheel near Main Street and Venice Way around 2:15 p.m. when a man stabbed him in the back, according to police.

The suspect then fled into a nearby business and was later detained by police, authorities said. The weapon was recovered by law enforcement

The driver is in stable condition, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

“Metro is angered and saddened to hear about this heinous act of violence and is providing support to our employee and his loved ones,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman Dave Sotero said in a statement. “We will work closely with the LAPD to investigate this incident and are grateful for their swift action in arresting the suspect.”

The assault is the second stabbing of a bus driver in a month: On May 24, a 61-year-old Metro driver suffered life-threatening injuries after he was stabbed by a 17-year-old boy over an argument about fare evasion.

As The Times reported in May on the growing number of assaults against Metro bus drivers, the agency is attempting to curtail such incidents by installing floor-to-ceiling plastic walls that fully encase the driver. The barriers were being tested on about 20 buses.

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“We’re [trying] to mitigate the vulnerabilities that exist right now where a patron or someone doing the assault still has access to the operator,” said Robert Gummer, a Metro deputy executive officer.

Anyone with information related to Thursday’s incident is asked to call the LAPD’s anonymous tip line at (877) 527-3247.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1449166

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy shot a man early Thursday in Bell Gardens in an incident that left bullet holes in the man’s vehicle and signs a patrol cruiser had been rammed.

The deputy shot the man about 4:30 a.m. during a traffic incident at Florence and Eastern avenues, according to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.

The wounded man was taken to a hospital by paramedics. Sheriff’s officials did not provide any further details of the events leading up to the gunfire, whether the man was armed or what threat he posed to the deputy.

The deputy suffered an unspecified injury and was taken to a hospital, the Sheriff’s Department said.

News helicopter footage of the scene at daylight showed a Sheriff’s Department SUV with a clearly smashed driver-side door, indicating a collision. A white sport utility vehicle driven by the wounded man had visible bullet holes in the front windshield and the rear windows blown out. Both vehicles were a considerable distance apart, suggesting a collision prior to the shooting.

Sheriff’s homicide detectives responded to the scene to investigate the shooting along with the inspector general’s investigators Thursday morning.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1443027

Alex Khachoyan, 64, is layering chunks of orange-tinged chicken breast onto metal skewers in the backyard of his Pasadena home. He deftly works the meat onto each spear without looking, a muscle memory he’s developed over decades of cooking for family, friends and customers.

“I’m eating barbecue almost every day,” he continues.

Grilling with his family is a weekly ritual for Khachoyan, who runs Garni Meat Market on a stretch of Washington Boulevard in Pasadena known as Little Armenia. Following advice from his doctor, he left his job as an auto body painter to open the butcher shop nearly 30 years ago. Now, he works alongside his son Harout, 28.

The shop is named for the village in Armenia and the Garni temple, believed to have been built around AD 77. It’s also an homage to the memory of a late friend who lived there.

“And my mom said Garni is a nice name,” he says.

It’s just after noon on a recent Monday, and Alex and Harout are working together to prepare a meal for family and friends. Close-up detail of marinated meats and flatbread on the grill.

Alex Khachoyan runs Garni Meat Market, located on a stretch of Washington Boulevard in Pasadena known as Little Armenia. The shop is named for the village in Armenia and the Garni temple.

(Liana Grigoryan / For The Times)

He uses a match to set the coals ablaze in a grill outfitted with a shallow, wide bed and slits along the edges designed to hold skewers. They call it an “Armenian” grill, and for $185 at the shop, you can have one too.

“You call somebody and say we’re doing khorovats, which means we’re grilling,” says Harout. “It’s an Armenian thing. That’s a sign to come over. It’s a family event and it’s really important to my culture.”

On a table nearby, Alex continues to skewer the day’s lunch, a selection of proteins prepared at the shop: filet mignon in a dry marinade of black pepper, paprika, Aleppo pepper and onions; pork chops and squares of pork belly heavily seasoned with salt, black pepper and Aleppo pepper; lemon pepper chicken wings; ground lamb studded with sweet onion; and chicken breast marinated in yogurt and mayonnaise, fresh garlic, paprika and salt.

Alex and Harout make 14 marinades for the shop, displayed in a glass case that runs the length of the store. In addition to the marinated meats, there are Tomahawk steaks, the dry, spicy sausage sujuk Alex makes himself and a selection of dips and spreads including hummus, Alex’s own yogurt, ajika and jajuk. A young man and his father stand behind the counter at their market.

Alex Khachoyan, right, with son Harout Khachoyan at Garni Meat Market, where Alex makes the spicy dry sausage sujuk and yogurt.

(Liana Grigoryan / For The Times)

They’ve brought a little bit of everything home with them for lunch. Alex’s wife, Tina, 63, is in the kitchen making rice pilaf, and Harout’s wife, Karen, 27, is nearby scooping the various dips into bowls alongside Tina’s homemade pickles and salads.

Harout tends to the fire, using a hair dryer attached to a long extension cord to hurry the coals toward white-hot. He sticks a bare hand into the grill to move a piece from the outer rim to the middle.

Next, Alex skewers green peppers, eggplant and tomato. The vegetables are the first on the grill.

“Without these vegetables, we don’t eat the barbecue,” he says. “We roast them, pull the skin off, chop it up, then add cilantro, parsley, garlic, onion, olive oil and salt to make a salad.” Mixing spices and onion with meat inside of Garni Meat Market store.

The Khachoyans make 14 marinades for their shop, displayed in a glass case that runs the length of the store.

(Liana Grigoryan / For The Times)

As soon as the vegetables are removed, the grill is filled with meat. The skewers are packed in close but never touching. Harout draws from a stack of dried grape vines underneath the grill and adds them to the fire. Throughout the year, they cut the vines growing off the side of the house and save them to use while grilling. During walnut season, they throw in the walnut shells.

“It’s more tasty,” Alex says. “It adds more flavor.”

It also enlivens the smoke, now sweeping and falling from the grill in thick gray clouds. Even from across the backyard, you can taste the smoke on the wind.

“I making this,” Alex says, proudly pointing to a long cylinder that holds dozens of metal skewers. It looks like a quiver, made from a sewer pipe he closed off at one end and a handle fashioned from a damaged piece of car molding.

“I making the car. I making the home. I making everything,” he says, his woolly mustache twitching as he laughs.

He also made the metal skewers, using a vise to twist the metal to create handles at the ends. He calls them Armenian swords.

When it’s time for the ground lamb, Harout keeps a close eye on the meat, hand-pressed into cigar-like patties along the skewers.

“You have to keep rotating them so they don’t fall off and cook on both sides,” he says.

While about half of Garni’s customers have their proteins grilled at the store, many buy the marinated meat and rely on the Khachoyans for grilling tips to cook at home. The family is adamant about the use of a charcoal grill, but they’ll offer instructions for alternative forms of grilling, baking or pan-frying. Alex Khachoyan and his wife, Tina, prepare a feast in their backyard.

Alex Khachoyan and his wife, Tina, prepare a feast: “You call somebody and say we’re doing khorovats, which means we’re grilling,” Alex says. “It’s an Armenian thing. That’s a sign to come over.”

(Liana Grigoryan / For The Times)

A little more than a year ago, the family started offering plates of grilled meat, rice and vegetables that you can eat on the patio out front.

As the meat nears ready, Harout rips open a package of mottled lavash and slides out a flat piece of bread about 3 feet long. He tears off a piece and uses it as a makeshift glove to remove a piece of pork belly from a skewer. He nonchalantly pops the steaming piece of meat into his mouth, oblivious to the heat.

He then offers a piece to a friend he’s invited over for lunch, who seems to appear out of thin air as soon as the meat is ready.

“Usually we’re really full before we even get to the table,” Harout says, still chewing. “We will be picking at the meat while we grill.”

He layers some serving dishes with bread, then continues to remove the meat from the skewers, piling the pork, chicken, lamb and beef over the lavash. The family takes turns bringing the meat to a table on the side of the house, already full of pickles, salads, spreads and wine glasses. There’s also an ice-cold bottle of vodka and empty shot glasses waiting.

The platters are passed around the table, with everyone choosing their favorite cuts. Harout prompts his father to take the “good piece” of pork chop, the one with a nice rim of fat caramelized around the bone.

Alex makes himself a bite of food with a piece of torn bread, pork and a scoop of his grilled vegetable salad. Alex Khachoyan and son Harout work the grill at Alex's home.

“Usually we’re really full before we even get to the table,” Harout Khachoyoan, left, says. “We will be picking at the meat while we grill.”

(Liana Grigoryan / For The Times)

“Armenian people don’t eat barbecue with a fork and knife,” he says. “They eat with hands. You taste it more.”

The filet mignon is impossibly tender, almost melting into the lavash beneath. The chicken is vibrant with Aleppo pepper, springy but still moist. The pork chop bones are excavated for every last morsel of meat. The luleh kebab, full of onion and paprika-infused juices running wild, is the first to disappear.

Wine is sipped. Vodka is shot back. The platters of food slowly diminish as the conversation becomes more lively, everyone more animated and a little glassy-eyed.

It’s a scene that plays out in countless Garni customers’ homes and backyards, fueled by the Khachoyans’ marinated kebabs.

“Having the shop makes us feel like you’re providing a service, but it’s something more than that to the families coming in,” Harout says. “We’re part of a very tight-knit Armenian community, and sometimes, our store gets to be at the center of it. ” Alex Khachoyan is showing his plate of grilled meats.

Alex Khachoyan shows the results of his grilling skills.

(Liana Grigoryan / For The Times)

Where to buy meat for grilling

Garni Meat Market, 1715 E. Washington Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 798-2676

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1419856

He is relatively new on the job at the Los Angeles Police Department, but Bosco, a 2-year-old Dutch shepherd, has a nose for trouble.

The narcotics detection canine sniffed out the secret held inside a soda vending machine at a downtown L.A. repair garage — it contained a large stash of heroin, fentanyl and an assault rifle, police said.

“There was a lot more than Coke in that soda machine,” said LAPD Capt. Lillian Carranza, who oversees the Gang and Narcotics Division, which includes several K9 officers. A split image of a soda vending machine at left and a dog posing for a photo at right.

The soda machine in a downtown Los Angeles repair garage where the drugs and assault rifle were found by Bosco, a 2-year-old Dutch shepherd who has worked with LAPD narcotics investigators for six months.

(Los Angeles Police Department)

Ventura County Sheriff’s Department investigators were conducting a search warrant Friday at the undisclosed garage location in central Los Angeles and requested LAPD assistance with one of its canines, Carranza said.

Bosco, with six months’ experience on the job, entered the garage and keyed in on the soda machine. From the outside, it looked like any other in businesses across L.A., but investigators opened up the machine and found 15 pounds of heroin, a kilogram of fentanyl and an assault-style rifle concealed inside, according to Carranza.

“Bosco is amazing. This is his third deployment. He is finding everything,” said Carranza, who often posts images of her division’s canine standouts on social media. “When regular officers cannot find anything, he can perform miracles.”

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The LAPD would not provide further details about the bust because it was part of a larger ongoing investigation by Ventura County sheriff’s detectives, Carranza said.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1418797

Full Artical won't fit.

How do you create a convincing span of nature over one of the state’s busiest freeway corridors so wildlife like L.A.’s famous, ill-fated cougar, P-22, can cross unscathed?

First you build a nursery and collect a million hyperlocal seeds.

This is not hyperbole. After Katherine Pakradouni was hired in January 2022 to grow the plants for the upcoming Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Agoura Hills, she spent much of the year combing the hills within five miles of the crossing, collecting — yes — more than a million seeds from native plants.

Before she went collecting, she had to build a special nursery near the north side of the crossing, where she and her team are planting those seeds to grow trays and trays of the native flora that will fill the crossing when the concrete superstructure is completed late next year.

Those girders are scheduled to be installed over several weeks, starting this fall, between midnight and 5 a.m. The freeway will never be closed completely, Rock said. Using precast girders means the span can be constructed first on one side of the freeway and then the other, so traffic can be diverted in the wee hours to other lanes.

Once the drainage system is completed and the soil is brought in, planting can begin. The $92-million project — split 50/50 between public money and donations to the National Wildlife Federation and its Save LA Cougars fund, including $26 million from Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation, its largest contributor — is scheduled for completion at the end of 2025.

California’s two biggest reservoirs are all but full after reaching perilously low levels late last year.

Lake Shasta, at 96% full, and Lake Oroville, at 100%, had fallen to around 25% to 30% of their capacity before the state’s historically wet winter rejuvenated them.

Statewide, reservoirs are at 85% of total capacity, well above their 30-year average of 73% for the month of June. With the Sierra Nevada snowpack still above three times its normal level for mid-June, they are expected to fill up even more as the snow melts.

The before-and-after images below from NASA show Lake Shasta on Nov. 18, 2022, when the lake stood at just 31% of capacity, and again on May 29, 2023, when it was 98% full.

California’s biggest reservoir had not been so full in more than four years, according to California Department of Water Resources data. A “bathtub ring” around the lake showing how far the water lline had fallen was clearly visible in November, but it had vanished by May.

Lake Oroville, in Butte County, has also undergone a spectacular transformation.

The image below shows the lake near Enterprise Bridge on Dec. 21, when levels were at 29% of capacity. A narrow band of water winds through the bottom of the gully, far below the bridge’s span. Aerial view of a bridge crossing a mostly dry lake with a narrow band of water in the gully far below the bridge

Lake Oroville under Enterprise Bridge had nearly disappeared on Dec. 21, 2022.

(Ken James / California Department of Water Resources)

Less than six months later, the landscape had undergone a noticeable shift. In the image below, taken June 12, water levels are dramatically higher at the same part of Lake Oroville, filling up nearly to the top of the piles supporting the bridge. Aerial view of a full lake with a bridge crossing

A similar view of Lake Oroville on June 12, 2023, showed a dramatic transformation. The reservoir is now 100% full.

(Ken James / California Department of Water Resources)

In the second photo, the reservoir is 100% capacity, submerging the barren hillsides that were previously exposed by low water levels.

A study of satellite data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found that the winter brought the greatest net gain of water in California’s lakes in the 22 years that the metric had been tracked.

Between October 2022 and March 2023, the Central Valley’s “lakes, rivers, soil, snowpack, and underground aquifers” saw their levels increased by the equivalent of 20 inches, or around twice the average gain in the last 22 years.

However, groundwater levels remain depleted, experts say, and may remain so into the future.

“One good winter of rain and snow won’t make up for years of extreme drought and extensive groundwater use,” said Felix Landerer, a scientist at JPL.

Times staff writer Nathan Solis contributed to this report.

Public policy and common perception have long tied the road to homelessness with mental illness and drug addiction.

But a new study out Tuesday — the largest and most comprehensive investigation of California’s homeless population in decades — found another cause is propelling much of the crisis on our streets: the precarious poverty of the working poor, especially Black and brown seniors.

“These are old people losing housing,” Dr. Margot Kushel told me. She’s the lead investigator on the study from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, done at the request of state health officials.

“They basically were ticking along very poor, and sometime after the age of 50 something happened,” Kushel said. That something — divorce, a loved one dying, an illness, even a cutback in hours on the job — sparked a downward spiral and their lives “just blew up,” as Kushel puts it.

Kushel and her team found that nearly half of single adults living on our streets are over the age of 50. And 7% of all homeless adults, single or in families, are over 65.

If that doesn’t kindle at least a bit of fear and empathy in your heart, you’re either a mogul or a trust fund baby who has never struggled to pay the bills. As much as we want to see the average homeless person as a drug tourist dropping into too-progressive cities for the good fentanyl and lax laws, as is the narrative in San Francisco, or someone whose mental illness makes it impossible for them to live unaided, the truth is simpler — and much more devastating: As Californians age, they are being priced out of housing.

We have come to the point of income inequality that if you are older and unable to work, homelessness is a real threat throughout the Golden State. For every 100 extremely low-income people in California, defined as making less than 30% of area median income, there are only 24 units of affordable housing available.

That makes obtaining and keeping permanent housing an ugly game of musical chairs, as the report puts it, in which too many are left standing when the music stops.

“What people need to know is there are professionals on the street,” DeDe Hancock told me. She’s a member of the lived experience advisory council for the study.

“People who are middle income are dropping to low,” Hancock said. “People working every day are living in cars.”

Before becoming homeless in 2006, Hancock, who has a psychology degree from UC San Diego, owned both a home and a rental property. She lost her job as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit after pointing out a financial discrepancy, she said, and filed a wrongful termination complaint.

But losing her job started that spiral that ended up with her losing both her properties. She and her son moved into her mother’s home, but within a few months, her mom died of pancreatic cancer. She ended up losing that property, too, when she couldn’t pay off a loan against it.

One loss leading to the next.

Her 12-year-old son went to live with his football coach, and she began sleeping in a storage unit where she was keeping the remnants of her lost life. But eventually she wound up on the streets, two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2009. She remained homeless for seven years until she was able to apply for early Social Security at age 62.

“The sad thing is that in those seven years, no one ever asked me why or how I became homeless,” Hancock told me.

And like so much of our inequality, race is a big factor — Kushel found that more than a quarter of those surveyed identified as Black, while only 6% of Californians overall are Black. Native Americans are also over-represented in our homeless population.

Those facts are shameful and should change both the narratives we tell ourselves about the 171,000 people homeless in California and how we fix the crisis.

That’s not to say that there isn’t also a crisis of mental illness on our streets, or that substance use isn’t a problem. Mental illness and substance use are clearly troubling pieces of the puzzle, as is the terrible job we do helping people re-establish themselves when they come out of our jails and prisons. The study found 1 in 5 of those interviewed became homeless after being incarcerated.

A bit more than a quarter of the people Kushel’s team interviewed had a mental illness serious enough to require a hospitalization at some point in their lives — a sign of what we all know, that our mental health care system is unconscionably lacking. Which is why initiatives such as CARE Court are critical to providing an alternative path for those with severe mental illness.

And though Kushel points out that the perception is that most people on the street are using drugs, “it’s not everybody,” she said. Only about a third said they were regular users of meth — the most common drug reported.

But Kushel found that even for people with those other factors, financial instability was the tipping point.

She discovered that many of the older people living on the streets were employed for most of their lives, often in physically demanding jobs such as waitressing, warehouse work or construction. The kind of jobs our economy depends on, where workers are easily replaced and often are.

That was the case for Tony, a homeless man I met last week in Sacramento, who says he ended up in a tent after “a storm of bad luck.” He asked me not to use his last name, but he shared his story. He was born in the San Fernando Valley and went to Sacramento to be with a girlfriend. He had a job in transportation but lost his license over a traffic violation in 2018 that he never cleared up. Then he broke up with the girlfriend and had to move out of her apartment.

“After you lose your job, you lose everything,” he told me, standing under a line of shady sycamore trees on a road that divides a rich neighborhood from one filled with encampments.

“There’s too much money on one side [of the street] and not enough on the other,” he said.

The study used eight counties throughout California, including Los Angeles, to create a snapshot of both rural and urban homelessness — surveying nearly 3,200 people and conducting 365 in-depth interviews. Researchers found that the results held regardless of whether a person was without housing in one of our large cities, or in our less-populated northern and eastern counties.

Kushel and her team also found another myth-dispelling fact: Most of the homeless people on California‘s streets are Californians. While conservative pundits love to scream about lazy homeless people flocking to the state for easy living, “we have to stop these narratives that people are flooding into California,” Kushel said. “It’s not true.”

Kushel found that 9 out of 10 people lost their last housing in California and three-quarters live in the same county as where they most recently had a place to call home.

And a side note: Does compassion require a specific ZIP Code? Most of the money cities and counties are using for housing and homelessness comes from the state and the federal government — not local coffers. Those dollars do not come with where-are-you-really-from strings.

Kushel said her findings should be a wake-up call that while access to substance use treatment and rebuilding the mental health care system are urgent for some of the homeless population, the only solution to homelessness is housing. We have to build not just affordable housing, but housing for extremely low-income folks, she said. And we have to do better at keeping people in the housing they have, through rent subsidies and other direct intervention, when life punches them in the face.

Because as fast as we can pull people out of homelessness, the rent is too high and more and more people can’t pay it. She found in the six months prior to their being homeless, people’s average income was $960.

So impoverished people need stable housing — which is the starting point L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is using, to her credit. My colleagues Ruben Vives and Doug Smith recently reported that during her first six months in office, Bass has found permanent housing for more than 4,300 people living on the streets and interim housing for thousands more. Her plans may be imperfect, but they have the right goal.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has initiated a crackdown in the troubled Tenderloin that entails arresting folks for crimes including public intoxication, dragging them into custody for a few hours, then tossing them back on the street. Not a single person detained has accepted offers of treatment so far — unsurprising since incarceration is not a huge trust-builder.

That kind of short-term fix drives people farther into the margins, Kushel warned, making them invisible but no less in need.

The last statistic I will give you is this: Fewer than half of people living on the streets have received formal help obtaining housing. Despite all our efforts, there is a massive disconnect between how much intervention the government perceives it is offering and how much is actually reaching people, Kushel said.

Though the reasons for that are unclear, she said it may be in part because aid is focused on shelters or troubled encampments and misses the quiet, hidden homeless.

That is the case for Ivan Dixon, 53, whom I talked to in an alley in Sacramento. He’s been homeless since his father kicked him out at age 14, he said, living with a group of underground hip-hop dancers until he aged out of that scene.

When I asked him if he wanted housing, he looked at me as if I was stupid.

“Of course I do,” he told me. But he said being homeless means you are “nobody’s friend.” He has not been offered help, he said. But he also tries to avoid people — moving every night to avoid becoming a “target” of both violence and the police.

“That’s just being in the streets,” he told me.

But it’s no life for an old man.