The completion of work along Fremont Street last week comes as the tower is listing 29 inches at the northwest corner, monitoring data shows that much of that tilt happened during digging and other activities surrounding the fix project that began early in 2021.

The Fremont Street work involved tying the tower to an extended foundation supported by 12 piles sunk to bedrock on the tower’s west side. The four-day load transfer operation was completed on June 14, monitoring records show.

The work came as engineers had already supported the north side of the tower to six piles sunk to bedrock along Mission Street.

The total of 18 perimeter piles currently handle about 500,000 pounds of building load apiece. The plan is for them to take on twice that load, with a goal of arresting settlement and reversing some of the current tilt by shifting more of the load to the east and south.

Millennium Tower Jun 9

SF's Millennium Tower now tilting more than ever to the west after early recovery

INVESTIGATIVE Mar 21

Mission Street Closed After Windows Fail at Salesforce Building, Millennium Tower in High Winds

Millennium fix officials indicated in a statement that the building is now starting to recover some of its tilt. That’s backed up by newly released rooftop monitoring data, showing that the newly supported tower is leaning about a quarter inch less at the northwest corner that it was just days before.

But David Williams, an expert in deep foundations, says its simply too soon to make any pronouncements of success.

He recalled that back in January, fix engineers were quick to hail the Mission Street operation a successful based on similar early data. But subsequent monitoring results showed that didn’t last and the tower’s westward tilt eventually got worse, not better. At the time of last week’s operation, in fact, the tower was tilting more than ever to the west.

“They have claimed early success before – that was premature,” Williams said. “So right now, we’ll have to wait and see how it responds.”

The Diocese’s attorneys declined an interview request from NBC Bay Area at a hearing Tuesday, but argued in a recent motion that confidentiality will protect accused clergy against “the disclosure of a ‘scandalous’ and deeply personal matter in publicly filed court documents.”

They added that confidentiality was necessary to “protect the privacy and to prevent identity theft and harassment of those individuals,” both alleged victims and accused clergy alike.

Plaintiff’s attorneys and victim advocates blasted the move and questioned the diocese’s commitment to transparency in the widening sex abuse scandal.

“What we see is not an endeavor to shed light on that cancerous past,” said Brent Weisenberg, an attorney representing plaintiffs and other creditors in the Oakland bankruptcy case. “We’re here with a request that on the first day of the case, all these names remain secret.”

Judge William J. Lafferty did not rule on the motion during Tuesday’s hearing, but instead suggested attorneys for the diocese file a new motion specifying exactly which names should be kept under seal and why.

The Diocese of Oakland currently faces more than 300 child sexual abuse lawsuits stemming from AB 218, a 2019 state law that opened a three-year window for such cases to proceed in court despite the statute of limitations. Attorneys for the plaintiffs said the figure could climb past 400 once every case was tallied.

Oakland May 8

Diocese of Oakland Files for Bankruptcy in Wake of Hundreds of Sex Abuse Lawsuits

oakland diocese May 8

Diocese of Oakland Files for Bankruptcy in Wake of Hundreds of Sex Abuse Lawsuits

In 2019, the Diocese of Oakland released a list of more than 60 priests who have been “credibly accused” of sexually abusing children. Attorneys for the diocese signaled Tuesday their confidentiality motion would not apply to the priests on that list.

However, as NBC Bay Area first reported, there are hundreds of Northern California priests who now face abuse allegations for the first time, including many from the Oakland diocese, and it’s currently unclear how those names will be treated. None of those newly accused priests have been added to the Diocese of Oakland’s public list of suspected abusers, despite some being named in multiple recent lawsuits.

Publicly available documents filed in state civil court have already named many such priests, including Oakland’s now-deceased founding bishop, Bishop Floyd Begin, and Weisenberg argued the court can’t seal what’s already hit the public domain.

An attorney for the diocese said in court they needed more time to review those names before making a determination on their confidentiality request.

Outside the courthouse, advocates from the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), held a small demonstration. They accused Oakland Bishop Michael Barber of using the bankruptcy process to shield the identities of alleged abusers from public disclosure.

“What I would like to ask you Bishop Michael Barber,” former Oakland priest Tim Stier said. “Is if you’re publicly committed to transparency and accountability on child abuse issues, I think you should tell your lawyers that because they seem to be taking a different tact.”

SNAP urged the Diocese to publish the names of all priests accused in recently filed lawsuits and reiterated calls for California Attorney General Rob Bonta to publish findings from his office’s ongoing probe into abuse within the Catholic church.

A spokesperson for the Diocese of Oakland did not respond to NBC Bay Area’s request for comment Tuesday.

The diocese’s new confidentiality motion is due next month.

One of the attackers, Danielle Chavez, told investigators, “She was motivated to attack … O’Connor because she did not like the kind of charges that O’Connor was in custody for.”

These new details are revealed in the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office’s incident report of the Oct. 24 jail attack, obtained exclusive by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit.

O’Connor has been in custody without bail at Elmwood Correctional Facility for more than a year and a half. She faces 39 criminal counts for allegedly hosting multiple booze-filled parties for her underaged son and his underaged friends in 2020 and 2021. Prosecutors say, at times, the Los Gatos mother encouraged some of the minors to be sexual with each other. O’Connor has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

According to the incident report, a Sheriff’s deputy was escorting O’Connor to her cell when other inmates in that cell “began to shout and make threats that they would beat her up.” Some of the inmates apparently knew about her child endangerment charges.

“So, prisoners have their own code of ethics, if you will, and they have a point where certain crimes are not acceptable,” said retired police detective Mike Leininger, referring to the child endangerment charges.

O’Connor told investigators that deputies asked if she wanted protective custody, but O’Connor reportedly declined even though she “felt intimidated.” Why O’Connor declined protective custody was not specified in the incident report.

“About ten minutes after … O’Connor was placed in the cell, she was attacked by” Danielle Chavez, Erika Amaya, Marianna Gardea, Anita Quiroz and Sophia Vigil.

In March, the Investigative Unit was the first news organization to report on the jail attack. The Sheriff’s Office’s statement of facts reported, “The assault was carried out using hands and feet, and the level of force used was likely [to] produce great bodily injury … the assault lasted for approximately 16 seconds.”

According to the incident report, initially O’Connor, “did not want to seek prosecution against the inmates who attacked her” because “she was afraid of retaliation.” She also told an investigator “she remembered …Chavez said … O’Connor needed to pay each of the female inmates inside the dorm $300 a week” if she wanted to stay in that cell with them.” Chavez denied this allegation when officials asked her about it.

Court documents show Chavez, Gardea, Vigil, Amaya and Quiroz were prosecuted. They all pled no contest to the assault charge and were sentenced to 1 to 2 years in county jail and probation. The Investigative Unit reached out to their individual attorneys who either did not respond or said they had no comment.

“Should [an incarcerated person] be concerned about their safety? All prisoners should be concerned about their safety. There are gang issues. There are subsets of these gangs now. They all need to be concerned about their safety, and the [facility] also reacts accordingly,” said Leininger.

In a statement to the Investigative Unit, Santa Cara County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said it, “continues to provide the highest level of security for our incarcerated individuals within our correctional facilities … Once housed, the risk assessment becomes an on-going process throughout the person’s incarcerations.”

O’Connor’s attorney had no comment.

Catch up on the Investigative Unit’s reporting on Shannon O’Connor’s criminal case:

Exclusive: What Los Gatos High School knew about Shannon O’Connor and what officials did about it

Los Gatos mom accused of hosting alcohol-fueled parties declines to change plea

Los Gatos mom attacked in jail, hospitalized

That reported maintenance logjam is especially troubling to Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey, whose office prosecuted PG&E in the Camp Fire. The 2018 fire – blamed on PG&E’s failure to maintain its aging system — destroyed the town of Paradise and left 85 people dead.

Five years later, Ramsey worries about the languishing maintenance, especially with all the added fuel from an unusually wet winter.   

“I’ve seen the grass at this time of year twice as high and the brush …. has just exploded,” Ramsey said. “That means a very concerning fire year.”

But in a recent call to investors last month, PG&E’s CEO Patti Poppe touted the utility’s extensive fire mitigation efforts as grounds for optimism. She said PG&E’s strategy of cutting power immediately at the first sign of trouble helped reduce its fire risk by more than 90%.

“It gives me a lot of confidence heading into wildfire season that we are prepared,” Poppe said in the May 4 earnings call. Restoring shareholder dividends, she said, will help obtain low cost financing needed to build on the progress.

PG&E May 31

Judge Dismisses Criminal Charges Against PG&E in 2020 Zogg Fire

PG&E May 31

PG&E Begins Power Line Inspections as Wildfire Season Looms

But a skeptical Ramsey points to the findings of the state regulator-appointed monitor’s report, in April, by Filsinger Energy Partners, which highlights PG&E’s current backlog of 170,000 outstanding “maintenance tags” in high fire areas.

“A ‘maintenance tag’ is an identification that something out of the normal has been found,” explained Dan Mulkey, a retired senior consulting electrical engineer at PG&E who is now a consultant.  

He says a utility must have detailed asset information to determine how quickly to make repairs on power poles and other vital components. “How dangerous is it?” he said, “That depends, mostly on the weather and how old it is.”

But according to the monitor, PG&E lacks precise age data on more than half of its lines. And its aging power poles account for half the company’s maintenance backlog.

Currently, the company is only replacing about half its goal of poles annually and only about 40 miles of its aging lines, the report noted. It’s target is 800 miles.   

PG&E officials recently signaled to the monitor that the task is daunting.

“The magnitude of capital needed for asset replacement programs,”  the report quotes unnamed PG&E managers as saying, “was far in excess of the amount of capital believed to be available.”

In a statement, PG&E says it continues to “aggressively work to reduce the backlog”  while “continually removing more ignition risk from the highest wildfire risk areas in our system.”

Reducing the backlog, the utility says, along with keeping up addressing new issues, will help make more progress reducing fire risks.

But Ramsey said in a recent interview that he is far from satisfied.

“PG&E needs to step up their game,” he said, adding that he regularly talks to company officials about both the progress achieved and the challenges remaining. Based on what he has seen this year, he says, PG&E still has not done enough to justify paying dividends.

“We’ve warned them —  they’ve got the warning,’’ Ramsey said, “and they need to approach it like their hair is on fire.”

“Our [AAPI] community doesn’t know how to respond and we don’t talk about it,” said Monica Khant, Executive Director of the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence.  “There needs to be that intent and thoughtful focus on serving survivors from the communities that they come from because if you lose that, then you’re not really responding to their needs and some of the challenges that they face.”

Khant, a former immigration attorney who represented asylum seekers, has helped hundreds of sexual violence survivors over the past two decades.

“For many years, gender-based violence in the AAPI community has been guided by not talking about it because of shame, because of isolation, because of the impact that it would have had on their families,” she said.  “There’s a strong sense of family honor, with that comes family shame.”

One in six AAPI women in the U.S. reports being raped in her lifetime, while one in five report suffering any kind of sexual violence, according to surveys conducted by the CDC.  The prevalence of rape against AAPI women has increased 8 percent since 2017.

‘Why Me?’

“I want other young Asian-American women to know that there are others out there,” said Irene Cho, 48, a sexual violence survivor who says she was raped by one of the pastors of her church when she was 19-years-old.  “Back then, I didn’t value who I was — I didn’t know the worth of all of who I am.”

Cho, who lives in Oakland, is a California native, but her family immigrated from South Korea and taught her to revere her elders, especially those in the church.

“There are parts of my culture that I absolutely cherish and love,” Cho said.  “Being part of the AAPI community, I do cherish how we respect our elders, but I do not cherish how that is used to manipulate young people to simply obey without question.”

Cho believes her abuser used her own cultural upbringing as a weapon to victimize and prey upon her.

“I didn’t want to bring shame upon him, which is so stupid,” she said.  “Now, as I look back –and I don’t mean that insulting me or degrading me, but I, again, wish I could shake my young person to say, ‘you matter more than he does. Your dignity matters.”

Cho says she waited more than a decade before publicly sharing her story of abuse.

“The questions of why began,” she said. “Why? Why me?”

aapi heritage May 12

Watch: Community Leaders Discuss Importance of AAPI Voices, Culture, and the Next Generation

Celebrating AAPI Heritage May 23

Artist Uses Cookies as Her Canvas to Honor Famous and Forgotten Asian Americans

Rise in anti-Asian Hate Met with Waves of Support

In California, hate crimes against Asian Americans increased by more than 177 percent in 2021, according to a report from the California Attorney General’s Office released last year. While the pandemic gave rise to racist hate speech and violent attacks against Asians, that extremism also spurred communities, nationwide, to speak up and stand alongside Asian Americans.  Advocates believe those efforts, paired with the ongoing #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, have recently given some victims the courage to come forward and seek the care and services they need.

The Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco received more than 2,000 requests last year from survivors and their children to join local support groups.

Also last year, Korean American Family Services, commonly known as KFAM, received 50 percent more requests from survivors seeking support.

The Sikh Family Center, which operates nationwide, says calls to its sexual violence crisis hotline spiked 160 percent in just two years.

AAPI Survivors Often Lumped Together Despite Varying Cultural and Ethnic Backgrounds

While Khant acknowledges the issue of sexual violence is now being discussed more frequently, she says it is still not brought up nearly enough.  She says part of the difficulty in understanding the impact of sexual violence is AAPI survivors are often all lumped together into a group comprised of roughly 50 counties and more than 100 languages. 

“So when you create a perception with broad strokes, you’re missing some of the nuances happening,” Khant said.  “You’re only talking about part of the story and really erasing the rest of it.

For example, domestic abuse rates in the U.S. for Chinese and Japanese victims are fairly similar, however, rates for Korean, Indian, and Filipino, and Vietnamese survivors are roughly double.

Khant adds that even when data is available, it may still be incomplete since culturally, AAPI survivors may be particularly hesitant to share their stories.

“That also contributes to just not knowing when this happens in our communities,” she said.  “When people are not speaking up or speaking out about the violence in our community that has happened, that data point is skewed.”

The nonprofit Freely in Hope works to empower survivors of sexual violence by providing them education and counseling.  The work is focused in Kenya and Zambia and was started by Nikole Lim, a San Francisco Bay Area native, who first witnessed the impact of sexual violence as a documentary filmmaker abroad.  She eventually decided to put down her camera in hopes of capturing real change.

“What I’ve experienced in my context of working in Africa is survivors are coming together to create their own communities of belonging, where they know that they’re not alone,” she said.  “There are similarities in the stories of pain, as there are similarities in the stories of healing and when those healing stories can be shared, I think that’s how survivors can move forward together.”

On June 17, sexual violence survivors and advocates, including Lim and Cho, will take part in ‘Redeeming Sanctuaries,’ a panel discussion in San Francisco centering around abuse in the church and what church leaders should be doing to prevent it.  Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban, who is a volunteer board member of Freely in Hope, will moderate the discussion.  Click here to learn how to reserve tickets.

In her book, ‘Liberation is Here,’ Lim recounts what she’s learned after spending more than a decade walking alongside sexual violence survivors in Africa.  As a third-generation Chinese American, she says the experience has pushed her to explore her own cultural upbringing.

“One of the priorities for Asian communities is …we are very communal, but often our community is based on what brings shame and what brings honor, which doesn’t always expose truths,” Lim said.  “I think I think that’s the gift of storytelling when we can tell our stories from our own nuanced perspective – that’s where healing can begin.”

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“You say you’re Catholic, and then you wonder what that person who’s looking back at you is thinking,” parishioner Toni Wilkerson said about the ongoing scandal.

While they didn’t agree on everything, one common theme emerged from the discussion: The desire for more transparency and dialogue from church leaders. 

“There’ve been so many [abuse] cases, but I’ve never been at a church where they openly discussed this,” Isabel Rajan said.

San Francisco May 25

Accused 2 Decades Ago and Returned to Ministry, SF Priest Faces New Allegations

INVESTIGATIVE Jun 23, 2022

Four Bay Area Priests Still on the Job Despite New Sex Abuse Allegations

But that hasn’t stopped these 10 parishioners from Church of the Transfiguration in Castro Valley from having these difficult discussions amongst themselves.

Many in the group said the scandal has been deeply harmful, but none have given serious thought to leaving the church.

“I haven’t considered leaving,” Peggy Maurer said. “But what I do feel is shame and embarrassment sometimes to admit that I’m Catholic and I hate that feeling.”

Some feared for the church’s future.

“I have a 23-year-old daughter who has no interest, she does not feel comfortable in the Catholic church right now,” Mel Speed said. “It’s literally in self-destruct mode now. You look around the congregation and it’s very rare to see younger people in the church.”

The parishioners said it will take time to heal the wounds caused by the scandal, but they see themselves as part of the solution. 

“If you love something and it’s broken, you want to fix it,” Wilkerson said. “I’m not going to leave something that’s broken. I’m going to stick around and fix it.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Diocese of Oakland said it recognizes that parishioners want more conversations about sexual abuse within the church, adding that anyone interested should contact their pastor directly.

Watch the video above for more from the conversation.

At the time of the Feb. 15, 2020 confrontation at the El Cerrito del Norte station, Cyrus Greene was 17. He admits he was armed and on juvenile probation for a gun and theft case at the time, but now insists he is a different person.

“I do think about it a lot every day,” Greene, now 20, said in an interview, “Because it’s changed my life.”

NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit has obtained the officer-worn body camera footage of the  incident that began before 2 p.m. on a Saturday.

Greene was shot multiple times by a pair of pursuing BART officers who had chased him through the station. The video shows the officers pursuing Greene, with guns drawn, as he jumps onto the tracks. The officers soon fire after Greene comes back to retrieve the handgun that fell out of his pants.

He spent seven months in the hospital and underwent three surgeries for wounds to his head and body. He was left with nerve damage and only limited use of his left arm and hand. He also has a bullet still lodged in his jaw.

The officers who came to the station that day, dispatch recordings show, were responding to a report by a passenger that a man on the train had displayed a gun in his waistband during a heated argument with a woman on the train.

Soon after arriving, video shows, the two responding officers spot Greene on the stopped train. He soon starts running down the aisle. “Let me see your hands!” one officer shouts to him.

One of the officers chases Greene inside the train, shouting: “Stop right there!”

As one of the officers pursues him in the train, the other runs alongside, down the platform, warning at one point: “You’re going to get shot!”

Greene keeps running out of the train and then jumps down onto the tracks. It’s the moment as he quickly turns back to grab the gun that fell out of his pants that the lead officer pursuing him shouts again: “Hey, You’re going to get shot!” That officer fired first, followed by the second officer.

The BART police chief at the time, Ed Alvarez, gave a statement the afternoon of the shooting saying, “officers got onto the platform, challenged that individual who ran off the train, down the platform and onto our trackway.  At this point a gun was produced and our officers ultimately shot.”

But Greene’s attorney Ben Nisenbaum argues the video shows that Greene didn’t actually “produce” the gun —  it simply fell out of his pants.

The video shows, he says, his client then picked up that weapon by the barrel, then turned around to resume running. The video shows that was the moment the officer shouted the warning about getting shot and opened fire.

Greene says while he shouldn’t have run from police that day, the officers didn’t have to shoot him.  

“I did pick it up,” Greene said about the gun he went back to get, “but…that’s not justifiable to shoot me. I didn’t point it at them or nothing like that. I was running when I was shot.” He asked how police could “feel endangered if I’m running away from you? That doesn’t make sense at all.”

Still, BART’s attorneys argued that the shooting was reasonable because of the imminent threat Greene posed at the moment he went back and grabbed the gun.

Nisenbaum said BART’s case fell apart, however, when officers reviewed a slowed down version of the bodycam video.

“All your shots were fired at Mr. Greene after he had picked the gun up and turned to run away from you, correct?” Nisenbaum asked the first officer who opened fire during a deposition. The officer simply replied: “correct.”

“Our view was that Cyrus did not threaten anybody with the gun,” Nisenbaum said. “He didn’t point the gun, did not take any action that was consistent with pointing the gun.”

Earlier this year, a judge in the case refused to grant BART’s motion to dismiss the case. Soon after that ruling, BART agreed to the $4.4 million settlement. The officers involved were not disciplined.

In a statement, BART said the officers were seeking to “lawfully arrest” Greene for an assault with a gun. Dispatch records show that the passenger reported in their call to authorities that Greene had displayed the gun in his waistband during the incident on the train.

“In fear for their safety and the safety of nearby patrons, two BART officers fired their weapons…” the agency said. “BART continues to deny wrongdoing but believes that the settlement is a fair resolution for all parties to the lawsuit.’’

Greene now spends his time raising his two year old daughter. He says he is relieved that the court case is over.

“I’m just glad that they finally had enough decency to own up to their wrongs,” Greene said, because “obviously, they were wrong…. I was just simply trying to get away.”

In two windstorms last month, windows broke or fell out of six separate high-rises in San Francisco. City officials ordered full reports from the owners within 14 days, explaining what happened.

In one of those reports, a consultant for Salesforce East at 350 Mission blames the neighboring 58-story Millennium Tower, across the street at 301 Mission, for its window failures.

The theory is that glass from a window that broke at Unit 49A of the Millennium blew across the street, hitting and breaking Salesforce East’s upper floor windows. Those upper floor windows sent glass down to lower floor windows, which were in turn damaged.  

But, Bill Thomas, a 42-year veteran of the glass industry, says glass fragments from Millennium’s broken window would simply be too heavy to have blown that far across a street —  even in extreme conditions like last month’s windstorms.

“This magical glass,” he said, “has to fly from Millennium  — across Mission, into the building.”

“That just doesn’t make any sense to me,” Thomas said.

But the Salesforce East report says it has evidence to back its theory, in the form of glass fragments found on the Salesforce East roof, which is enclosed by a 30-foot high wall. The fact that there was glass on the roof of the 30-story high-rise, it says, suggests those fragments were somehow “blown towards” Salesforce East “from a higher elevation.”

The chain reaction triggered by those upper windows breaking, the report says, caused damage to the lower floor windows. In all, city officials say some 20 windows broke from the 10^th to the 30^th floors.

Salesforce East officials did not respond to a request for comment.

“It is just a case of finger-pointing — it is baloney, and I’m calling ‘BS,’’’ said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who is seeking reforms on city inspection requirements for the city’s newest, tallest buildings that had previously enjoyed 30-year inspection exemptions on their windows. “There is no earthly way that the glass at 301 Mission could have caused those failures.”

Millennium’s own report did acknowledge that one of its windows failed after being left open, causing it to break in high winds. But it says all operable windows in high-rises pose a similar risk if someone leaves them open, like what happened with Unit 49A.

In a statement, the city’s Department of Building Inspection says it was “not satisfied” with any of the reports it has received to date. Officials say the plan now is to enlist an independent expert to help determine why windows failed on all six buildings during the windstorms, and make recommendations.  

Thomas says that evaluation is urgently needed, because while many high-rise windows have protective backing that prevent glass from falling out even after a window breaks, the backing isn’t required by code.

“Why did glass break in any of these buildings? Why did the glass evacuate (and fall from) the openings in these buildings. Neither one of those two things should have happened,” Thomas concluded. “Until that is corrected, it is a potential hazard to the general public.”

A newly-released coroner’s report shows Price died in November 2021 from an overdose of fentanyl and a concoction of other drugs, including flualprazolam and cocaine. At the time, the underaged teenager was with 24-year-old Michael J. Russell in his Corralitos home, which is owned by his parents Pricilla Ann Russell and Micheal B. Russell.

Michael J. Russell, also known as Mikey, was never criminally charged in Price’s death. But, earlier this year, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for providing Price and another minor with narcotics and having sex with both teenage girls.

In a yearlong investigation, NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit reported on serious concerns with how law enforcement handled Price’s death and the possible impact it had on Russell’s criminal prosecution.

Separately, the Price family sued Michael Russell and his parents for wrongful death in civil court.

In the lawsuit, they accuse “Mikey” and his family of delaying medical help that may have saved their daughter’s life. They also accused his parents of knowing their son “had a history of preying on young/underage girls” and that their home “provided a place/opportunity for crimes against underage[d] girls.”

“I think all of us as a family … we just knew we were going to make a big deal,” said Michael Price, Emma Lace Price’s father. “This wasn’t going to be something we were going to be quiet about and go away and not make public … It was devastating to our community, to our family.”

NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit reached out to the Russell’s attorney and his parent’s attorney but have not heard back. In court records, they denied the allegations. The settlement is not an admission of liability.

Since Price’s parents have not agreed to settle with Michael Russell, they can still continue their civil suit against him.

Catch up on the Investigative Unit’s yearlong coverage of this case: www.nbcbayarea.com/fightingfentanyl

Investigative Reporter Candice Nguyen worked on this story. If you have tip for her about this case or another email candice.nguyen@nbcuni.com.

Just in San Francisco, police records show close to 2,900 shopliftings were reported in 2022, way up from 2020, when shopliftings actually decreased by 34%, when the COVID pandemic began and many businesses shut down.

But the crime rebounded in 2021, with shoplifting reports going back up 15% from pre-pandemic levels. 

“There’s no deterrent in the state of California to discourage theft at this point,” said Mike Leininger, a retired police officer and security consultant. 

Under current state law, shoplifting merchandise valued under $950 is considered a misdemeanor and often not investigated. 

“They basically opened the gates to theft,” said Leninger. “And you are seeing that in stores that are closing, chains that are lowering the number of stores under the guise of financial constraints or reasons.”

He said what happened with the loss prevention employee in Pleasanton’s Home Depot Tuesday should have never happened.  

Pleasanton Apr 19

Slain Pleasanton Home Depot Employee Remembered as ‘Model for Others'

Pleasanton Apr 18

Employee Shot and Killed While Trying to Stop Theft Inside Pleasanton Home Depot

“For the state of California, for licensed security guards, they are mandated to observe and report only. They’re not to take physical action,” he said.

Leininger added that if you witness a shoplifting as an employee or customer, you should not engage the suspect. It is best to notify the authorities and record, only if it is safe to do so.

Alisia Rivera Mendoza of East Palo Alto is charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter and three counts of elder abuse stemming from the Aug. 27 incident at Atria Park in San Mateo. One resident, Trudy Maxwell, 93, died shortly after she drank the cleaner. Another resident survived, but a third, Peter Schroder Jr., also 93, died 11 days later.

“It’s been pretty anguishing,” said Schroder’s daughter, Susan, who was with her father when he died. “You know, it’s hard to sleep at night. But, you know: My father loved me and I loved him, and that’s the most important thing.”

In filing the charges earlier this month, prosecutors allege that Rivera Mendoza’s negligence caused the victims to endure “unjustifiable physical pain and mental suffering” and “willfully caused and permitted” lives to be put in peril.

Rivera Mendoza did not respond to requests for comment. She is due in court on May 12 for arraignment.

Officials with Atria Senior Living told us they are aware of the charges and “will continue to cooperate with the authorities” during the legal process.

“We took immediate action in response to this incident, including reviewing and reinforcing our training and policies on chemical safety. As always, we remain focused on the safety, health, and well-being of all our residents.”

San Mateo District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said that while Rivera Mendoza has been remorseful and clearly did not intend for the fluid to be served to residents, there’s clear evidence of criminal negligence.

“If you are criminally negligent and failing to take care of the person in your charge, we’re not going to say ‘that’s too bad,’’’ he said. “We’re going to hold you accountable for it.”

One critical piece of the case, he says, is the kitchen surveillance video showing Rivera Mendoza pouring out cleaner from a larger container into the pitcher. “It’s very hard to deal with a 5-gallon drum,” Wagstaffe said, “and so she poured it into a fruit pitcher that is used to serve drinks, intending to then take that and move it elsewhere to do the cleaning with just a simple little container. And she left it, she got busy with some other things.”

The video also shows another worker warned Rivera Mendoza about what she was doing, but then both became distracted, Wagstaffe said.

Schroder, who is suing Atria for wrongful death, says she is uncomfortable that the only charges filed so far are against the care worker, not the management.

“It seems like she’s a scapegoat to me,” she said, adding that Atria mangers are “the ones that are actively holding people’s lives in their hands because of the example they set.”

Wagstaffe says that while he has met with victims’ families and understands them wanting to have Atria held accountable, that decision now rests with the Attorney General’s office.

“We will let the attorney general, with all their broad resources, decide if that’s appropriate,” he said, adding that his office joined with Contra Costa prosecutors in seeking the state’s involvement. That office has charged a worker at Atria Walnut Creek with the death of Constantine Canoun. Authorities believe Canoun drank cleaning solution that the worker left out. The incident happened four days before the Atria Park poisonings.

Dr. Omondi Nyong’o is an internationally recognized pediatric ophthalmologist who rose to become the first and only Black physician to chair a department within the Palo Alto Medical Foundation region of Sutter Health, according to the lawsuit. But he says a racist environment that permeates Sutter sabotaged his career and inflicted shame and embarrassment. 

“I was subject to the type of racism that hits you in the back of the head when you don’t see it coming,” Nyong’o said. “I was blindsided by leaders who suddenly and harshly demoted me from my leadership positions, even though I was excelling at them, in order to shield themselves from accountability for their own shortcomings.”

The lawsuit alleges Sutter’s workplace culture “disrespects, undermines, and disciplines African American staff and doctors” such as Dr. Nyong’o due to racial bias.

“Many of us have either experienced the things that I have while at Sutter or have been chased away over the years,” Nyong’o said, echoing allegations made in the lawsuit.

Nyong’o rose to ranks rarely awarded to Black physicians within Sutter’s network, according to the lawsuit, but his upward trajectory was abruptly halted “due to racial discomfort” from predominantly white leadership within the medical system.

In 2015, according to the lawsuit, Nyong’o was awarded the position of ophthalmology and optometry department chair, the first ever Black physician to achieve that leadership level within Palo Alto Foundation Medical Group. Two years later, Nyong’o says he was promoted again, taking over as medical director of surgical specialties for the Palo Alto Foundation Medical Group. 

But the promotion was short-lived. 

According to the lawsuit, Nyong’o was ordered to carry out a hospital restructuring plan that was conceived of by two of his bosses, which would have transferred certain doctors to different locations. But when those physicians voiced opposition, the plan was scrapped, and Nyong’o says he was forced to take the fall. He was stripped of his medical director title, according to the suit, and his pay cut by about 40%

“A Black doctor like me was expendable,” Nyong’o said. “You know, we were used as tokens.”

In a statement, a Sutter Health spokesperson told NBC Bay Area: “We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce, as well as a healthcare environment where all are treated equitably, with dignity and respect, and provided the opportunity to reach their full potential. As a healthcare system serving diverse people and communities, we do not tolerate discrimination of any kind.”

In court filings responding to Nyong’o’s lawsuit, Sutter attorneys denied any wrongdoing and asserted that any negative employment actions taken against the doctor were for “legitimate non-discriminatory and non-retaliatory business reasons.”

Nyong’o stayed at Sutter, where he continues to work, but says his mistreatment carried on.

“When I asked these leaders to please stop this pattern of racial scapegoating, instead of protecting me, they doubled down and labeled me an angry Black doctor,” Nyong’o said.

“Sutter readily agrees that I excel with patient care and that I’m a top performing doctor and clinician. They have depended upon the disguise or the pretext of really disgusting racially coded epithets in order to justify retaliating against me for complaining about poor treatment.”

In one instance described in the lawsuit, Nyong’o says his supervisor asked him not to use the elevators at his clinic because white doctors would be “uncomfortable” seeing him there, leaving him only with the back stairs to access the facility. Nyong’o says he rejected the request.

In 2020, according to the lawsuit, Sutter placed Nyong’o on a performance improvement plan, not because of patient care issues, but because of his perceived attitude.

“If it could happen to Dr. Nyong’o, it really could happen to any doctor, any Black doctor [at Sutter],” said Kelly Dermody, Nyong’o’s attorney. 

Nyong’o’s lawsuit also includes accounts from seven other anonymous Black doctors at Sutter. 

“We wanted to provide that fuller picture, so that Dr. Nyong’o’s story could be understood as not just one person complaining,” Dermody said. “But really kind of a constellation of problems happening in an ecosystem that really devalues Black doctors and Black leadership.”

Several of those other Black doctors were labeled as “aggressive” or “intimidating” when raising concerns about racial discrimination or patient care, according to the lawsuit. 

One Black surgeon described being followed to their office by a white coworker who questioned whether they actually worked there, according to the lawsuit. Another Black doctor said they received similar treatment when a white coworker attempted to stop them from parking in a space reserved for physicians. 

Sutter Health is one of California’s largest medical systems, with more than 20 hospitals, 53,000 employees, and three million patients. But according to the lawsuit, there are no black leaders within Sutter’s senior ranks. Of 354 physicians holding any leadership positions within Sutter, only three are Black. A Sutter Health spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of those figures.

NBC Bay Area requested similar racial demographics from other large health systems such as Kaiser, Stanford, and UCSF, but none would provide us with their data.

“I personally can’t see problems of this magnitude and do nothing about it,” said Dr. Vanessa Grubbs, an Oakland-based nephrologist who recently founded the non-profit Black Doc Village. 

The fledgling organization aims to study racism in the medical field and help Black doctors and med students overcome discrimination in the workplace.

“There is just so much that we are losing because we are systematically undervaluing an entire group of people based upon these delusions that somehow Black people are less than,” Grubbs said.

Grubbs, who’s been practicing medicine for more than 20 years, says discrimination can impact Black doctors early, sometimes during their required residency training. She says it has the potential to derail careers.

“Black people in this country are dying disproportionately across all outcomes,” Grubbs said. “And we know that Black people get better health outcomes when they have Black doctors. We know that they prefer Black doctors.”

 A 2023 study published in JAMA surgery found that Black surgical residents faced disproportionate risks of attrition compared to their colleagues of other races, meaning they were more likely to leave or be kicked out of those programs. 

“To make true change in something we have to understand and define the issue,” said Dr. Lee Haruno, Chief Resident in Orthopedic Surgery at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and one of the study’s authors.

Haruno said the medical field should focus on improving recruitment, retention and promotion of women and underrepresented minorities.

“We will be unable to meet the holistic needs of our patients if we fail to address a lot of the needs with representation and diversity,” Haruno said.

According to a 2022 report from the Association of Medical Colleges, just 6% of physicians are Black, yet the latest U.S. Census Bureau data shows Black people make up 14% of the population. 

Unless both sides come to a settlement in Nyong’o’s lawsuit, the case is expected to go to trial this summer. 

“You can never really have despair unless you’ve had hope to begin with,” Nyong’o said. “And this journey of mine has been one of ultimate hope, even through the despair.”

Watch our entire investigative series

• Part 1: Lawsuit alleges racism ‘permeates’ Sutter Health
• Part 2: Black doctors allege discrimination at Sutter Health
• Part 3: Sutter CEO ‘disturbed’ by discrimination claims in NBC Bay Area report, orders reforms
• Part 4: Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban discusses discrimination claims against Sutter
• Part 5: Black doctors accuse Sutter of discrimination, CEO’s response met with skepticism

Contact The Investigative Unit

Follow @BigadShaban

submit tips | 1-888-996-TIPS | e-mail Bigad

Five-year-old Eliyanah Crisostomo was shot and killed on Interstate 880 near the Fremont-Milpitas border Saturday evening. The victim’s parents were inside the vehicle at the time of the shooting but were uninjured, the California Highway Patrol said. No arrests have been made and no suspects were immediately identified.

An NBC Bay Area analysis of California Highway Patrol data found that reports of highway shootings in the Bay Area doubled during a three-year period, from 82 incidents in 2019 to 178 in 2021. There were 384 total reports across nine Bay Area counties during that span. 

There were 15 fatal shootings from 2019-2021. Injuries were reported in 30% of the cases.

Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano set the bar for both the total number of reports and the rate of incidents adjusted for population. Contra Costa saw the biggest increase, from eight reports in 2019 to 49 in 2021.

But not all counties appeared to be impacted equally. Napa was the only county with zero reports of shootings from 2019-2021. Sonoma and Marin each had three reports total from 2019-2021.

The portion of Interstate 880 where Crisostomo was shot and killed near the Fremont-Milpitas border had one shooting each year from 2019-2021. In two of those cases, an injury was reported.

Bay Area Highway Shootings, 2019-2021

The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit mapped 378 reported highway shootings that occurred between 2019 and 2021. Larger points indicate reports of death or injury. Approximate shooting locations are based on data from the California Highway Patrol.

Note: Six additional reports were not mapped due to unclear location descriptions
Source: California Highway Patrol
Credit: Sean Myers/NBC Bay Area

Road Rage and Gang Activity

The rise in shootings can be attributed to an increase in gang activity and road rage, according to the CHP. The agency said it is rare for innocent people to be injured or killed.

The tragic death of Crisostomo came 17 months after the highway shooting death of 2-year-old Jasper Wu on Interstate 880 in Oakland. Three suspects were eventually arrested and charged with murder, shooting at an occupied vehicle and possession of a firearm by a felon. Two of the suspects were also charged with conspiracy to commit a crime and criminal street gang conspiracy.

In nearly 90% of cases from 2019-2021, no arrest was made.

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When they originally cited the buildings last month, Department of Building Inspection officials specified the 14-day deadline for licensed architects or engineers to report back on the findings of complete façade inspections. But officials say they’re satisfied that owners are cooperating in meeting the challenge of arranging mass inspections of hundreds of windows.

 But, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin was quick to say the city still needs reports on what triggered the string of failures as soon as possible.

“Time is of the essence,” he said. “The city needs this data so we can determine what caused these failures and understand what steps need to be taken to prevent future failures. This is a critical life safety matter.”

The  owners of 555 California St. – where the first window failure happened on March 14 – have been cooperative and were the first to be given more time to complete the inspections required under a notice of violation, said Patrick Hannan, spokesman for the Department of Building Inspection.

INVESTIGATIVE Apr 4

Storm Failures Trigger Mandatory Inspection for 71 Newer SF High-Rises

INVESTIGATIVE Mar 24

Window Failures Hit SF High-Rises With 30-Year Inspection Exemptions

The other five buildings had apparent wind-related failures on or after March 21. First at the 50 California Street building, then high-rises at 350 Mission, 301 Mission and 1400 Mission Streets. The next day, inspectors issued a citation related to a broken window at Fox Plaza on Market Street.

The deadline has now passed for all those owners to produce reports, said Department of Building Inspection spokesman Patrick Hannan. But he added city officials are satisfied that the owners have secured the windows and have protected the surrounding areas from the potential for falling glass.

“The consecutive storm events delayed the building managers’ ability to conduct exterior façade evaluations,” Hannan said, “but we are in ongoing communication with the building management for these properties and confirm progress is being made on the reports.”

As a result of the six failures, the city has announced it is ordering façade inspections for 71 newer buildings that are 15 or more stories. Because they were buiilt after 1998, the 71 buildings had been exempt from initial inspections for 30 years after being built under the city’s code.

The deadline to complete those inspections is Nov. 1, according to legislation introduced this week by Supervisor Peskin. Three of the buildings that had windows fail last month, all along Mission Street – had been exempt. However, the city had already required the Millennium Tower at 301 Mission to be inspected after a window failed there in 2020.

“I was excited because it meant that somebody couldn’t build behind my property,” Kanarek said.

She never imagined all that soil above her property sliding down the hillside, splintering fences and piling up in her backyard.

But that’s the reality she and other property owners along Cooper Drive now face following a parade of winter storms that dumped rain onto the unstable hillside, leading to a slow-moving mudslide that forced residents out of their homes.

It feels like Deja vu for Kanarek, whose property got hit by a similar slide back in 2019. She had to spend $5,000 to replace a destroyed fence and says her neighbor spent significantly more repairing the collapsed hillside.

That year, the city financed a project to replace 875 feet of a deteriorated concrete drainage ditch and install a retaining wall to repair “localized failures” along the slope, and Kanarek believed her hillside problems were in the past.

“It was work that was going to help us,” Kanarek said. “I had no reason to think that it wasn’t going to help.”

Then came 2023 and a string of powerful  winter storms.

“So my neighbor, a day or two after New Year’s … called the fire department because they saw a landslide forming at the top of the hillside,” Kanarek said.

Katherine was forced to leave her home for weeks and the fire department red tagged her home, saying it was unsafe to occupy. Then in March, after getting pummeled by more rain, the slide continued down the hillside, plowing through her back and side fences and depositing mounds of dirt in her yard.

“I’m just nervous and have lost a lot of sleep and have anxiety over what’s going on,” Kanarek said. “Not being sure that it’s going to be safe to be in my own home.”

Kanarek said she can’t be sure what’s causing the slides, but believes it’s a combination of inadequate drainage and unstable soil. The city of Santa Rosa owns an easement behind her backyard, and a large Jewish temple sits on top of the hill.

Now, Kanarek says she can’t help but question the city’s 2019 project and whether they went far enough to shore up the hillside. She’s left scrambling for answers about what caused the slide, who’s responsible, and whether she’ll be on the hook for more repair costs.

The city told NBC Bay Area its current priority is “removing the slide mass that is currently threatening life safety” and that “any future issues would be reviewed and discussed once the immediate threat has been mitigated.” 

According to the city, the recent slide has impacted the retaining wall and concrete drainage installed in 2019, but “the slide area reconstructed by the city in 2019 appears to be stable and is showing no signs of failure.”

Removing the slide mass from the hillside is expected to cost about $300,000, according to a city spokesperson. They couldn’t say what costs homeowners might be on the hook for until the debris has been removed and they can investigate what caused the slide.

Earlier this week, Kanarek said she received a message from an engineer working on the cleanup project saying the city would replace her back fence along the easement, but not her side fence.

Congregation Shomrei Torah, the temple that owns the land above the city’s easement, sent a statement saying they’re “absolutely aware of the landslide’s impact on the neighborhood” and are working with the city to find a path forward.

“Shomrei Torah is working closely with the city, which has had its engineers keeping close watch on the slide and the safety of the people who live in the affected homes,” said Executive Director Katie Evenbeck. “We are working with the city on assessing the cause of the slide and its resolution, including repair costs. The rainfall we’ve received since Dec. 26 has created challenges throughout our community.”

As for Kanarek, she’s hoping for a long-term solution, one that doesn’t leave her anxious the next time it starts raining.

“We haven’t really heard much from the city about next steps,” Kanarek said. “I’m nervous that the solution isn’t going to be long lasting. I’m nervous that it’s going to continue to be unsafe. I’m worried that I’m going to have to relive this nightmare every year.”

The order comes less than a week after NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit first reported that three of the six buildings hit by window failures were post-1998 high-rises that were previously exempt from façade inspections for the first 30 years after being built.

One of those exempt buildings was Salesforce East, completed in 2015. That building, at 350 Mission Street, had at least 19 windows failed during recent wind storms.

The city has now ordered that it conduct an emergency façade inspection within 14 days.

Two other window failures were reported in other buildings on Mission Street – the Millennium Tower at 301 Mission and the building at 1400 Mission.

Those two buildings were also built after 1998 and should also have 30 year inspection exemptions – However, Millennium Tower had previously been ordered to inspect its windows after an open window broke free and fell in high winds back in 2020.

San Francisco Mar 28

Cracked High-Rise Window in San Francisco's Financial District Secured

INVESTIGATIVE Mar 24

Window Failures Hit SF High-Rises With 30-Year Inspection Exemptions

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin was the first to call for more inspections. He welcomed the order as a good first step as he introduced new rules Tuesday that would give building owners until November to get inspections done.

“As we are trying to figure out why these buildings failed, this is going to give us knowledge about the rest of the buildings and whether they are going to perform in high wind events,” he said.

Under the emergency rules, owners of newer high rise buildings – 15-stories or taller – must commission an architect or engineer to perform checks of the entire building façade to “ensure the safety and stability of all façade elements, including windows,” according to a statement issued by the city.  

The mayor issued an emergency declaration on March 27, granting the authority to city inspectors to impose new inspection requirements.

The inspections, city officials say, are designed to  spot cracks or other signs that windows could be at risk of failing.

The new requirement will apply to 71 buildings that are 15 or more stories tall.  The city has about 120 post-1998 buildings between 5 and 15 stories – and those are still exempt from inspections for the first 30 years after being built.   

“This is an important step we are taking to ensure the safety of all of our buildings to keep our residents safe,” Mayor Breed said in a statement issued Tuesday. “I want to thank the Department of Building Inspection for their work to not only respond immediately to these glass issues during the storms, but also for quickly taking on this critical program expansion.”

All the six high-rise buildings with recent window failures are currently under 14-day orders to inspect windows to assure façade integrity.  In addition to the three Mission street buildings – the three other buildings that were hit by failures were at 555 California Street, 50 California Street and Fox Plaza on Market Street.   

Both Salesforce East at 350 Mission Street, and a 15-story building at 1400 Mission Street had windows fail during Tuesday’s windstorm. Salesforce East was completed in 2015 and 1400 Mission in 2016 – that means, under city regulations, both qualified for a 30-year inspection exemption automatically granted to buildings with permit applications dating back to 1998.

The exemption means those newer buildings do not need to perform “initial” façade inspections for decades. The deadline for an initial inspection would have been the year 2045 for Salesforce East and the year 2046 for 1400 Mission. However, both buildings now face an emergency 14-day inspection deadline following this week’s window failures.   

The problem plagued Millennium Tower, at 301 Mission Street, also reported a window failure on Tuesday.

While that building – completed in 2009 — also previously qualified for the inspection exemption … inspectors had already ordered a full façade inspection after a 2020 failure of a window that was left open in high winds.

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin said Friday that in light of the failures with three newer buildings, it’s time to end the 30-year inspection exemption. He pointed to what happened at the Salesforce East building as an example of the hidden danger that might have been addressed if it hadn’t been exempted from an initial façade inspection until 2045. On Tuesday more than a dozen windows broke or cracked, at least one each from the 11^th to 30^th floor, sending shards of glass raining down on the street.  

“This obviously made sense when it was drafted – to concentrate on older buildings — but now we have a rash of virtually brand new buildings and we have rethink this entire inspection dynamic,” Peskin said.

The current law requires façade inspections for older buildings, with more than five stories, by 2021 – but only if they were built before 1910.  Supervisor Peskin says city officials tell him that 40% of the buildings that qualify for those inspections have failed to meet that deadline to do the façade inspections.

 According to current city standards, 502 structures built between 1910-1925 era structures will come due for inspection by the end of this year.  A total of 438 buildings, built between 1926-1970, will be due for inspections at the end of 2025.  And 249 buildings, built between 1970 and 1998, will be due for inspection in 2027.

Two other older high rises hit by recent window failures, Fox Plaza at 1390 Market Street, and 555 California Street were due for inspections by 2025, under the rules – but both must now be inspected within 14 days due to window failures.  Although building inspection records show an 11th floor window blew out back in 2016 at 555 California, the city records do not indicate that the city inspector required a complete façade inspection before closing the case in 2017.  

Another building where a window failed this week – At 50 California – was not set for a façade inspection until 2027.  Now, because of the window failure, it will also require an inspection within 14 days.  

Supervisor Peskin says he wants emergency inspections of 180 of the city’s tallest buildings. He says he is working with the mayor’s office about an emergency order to get it done soon, but stresses any such order would need the approval of the Board of Supervisors.

Those failures prompted the closure of a stretch of Mission Street overnight as a precaution, city officials said.

The Mission Street window failures came hours after a window blew out between the 13^th and 14^th floor of the high-rise at 50 California Street. No one was injured in that failure, but the area immediately around that building was also closed down as a precaution. That incident came a week after a 43^rd floor window failed  at the former Bank of America building at 555 California Street.  That failure also came during a massive wind storm.  

The owner of the building has since been cited and given 14 days to inspect the façade of the structure to assure it is stable.

Patrick Hannan, spokesman for the Department of Building Inspection, says teams of inspectors were on site at the 50 California building this afternoon after Tuesday’s incident. Later, they also discovered multiple cracked or failed windows between the 11^th and 30^th floors of the Salesforce East building on the Mission Street side. Hannan said that as of Tuesday night, at least one window was found to be cracked on each of those floors.

Separately, inspectors were examining one window on the 49^th floor of the Millennium Tower that had failed as of Tuesday night.

San Francisco Fire Capt. Jonathan Baxter said that fire crews, dispatched for a tree down on Mission Street, observed “issues related to the windows” at the Millennium Tower. Baxter did not have any further details, and had no information on any failed window failures at Salesforce. He confirmed the 300 block of Mission will be closed overnight as a precaution related to the failed window found at the Millennium at 301 Mission. The Salesforce is at 350 Mission.

Hannan, the building inspection department spokesman, said crews were checking all three locations doing inspections Tuesday night.

“In all three situations, we sent inspectors out for emergency response, they are evaluating the situation and coordinate with building management,” Hannan said.

The problems led Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin to call for new hearings on high-rise window safety.

The Millennium Tower has had a documented history of problems with windows. The tower was cited by building inspectors back in 2020. That’s when a 41^st floor window, that had been propped open by a resident, broke free in a storm and fell to the ground. No one was injured.

The city has pushed for a redesign of the building’s window system. Meanwhile, the tower’s homeowners association has repeatedly cautioned residents to keep windows closed in windy conditions.

Editor’s note: The city of San Francisco has made a critical correction regarding a story NBC Bay Area first broke Tuesday night. The city initially said they found approximately 20 windows that had failed at the Salesforce Tower during Tuesday’s storm. The city on Wednesday morning admitted it made a mistake and issued a correction – saying the failed windows are in the smaller Salesforce East building at 350 mission, not the larger Salesforce Tower. They say there is currently no threat to the public. Mission Street remains closed between the two buildings as the city continues to investigate.

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One inspection photo released by the Department of Building Inspection shows several remaining chunks of glass inside the frame where the one window broke out Tuesday. Other photos show another window around the corner has been reinforced.  Authorities say that window also cracked. It is not clear if the crack authorities identified preexisted the incident or was triggered when the first window failed Tuesday.

Building officials issued an immediate notice of violation on Tuesday stemming from the cracked and falling glass.  Nobody was injured in the building or on the street below.

San Francisco Mar 15

SF Orders All Windows in High-Rise Building Inspected After One Shattered and Fell

San Francisco Mar 14

Window Pane Blown Off From SF High-Rise Building

On Wednesday, inspectors ordered the owners of 555 California Street to inspect all of the windows in the 52-story structure to assure they’re safe. But that inspection order was expanded Thursday to require that the high-rise’s “exterior facades (be) surveyed by a California licensed architect or engineer to ensure stability of all facade elements.”

Since the photos were taken, the window that broke and a cracked window around the corner of the building have been reinforced with plywood.

Building inspectors went to the site on both Tuesday and Wednesday, records show, which also indicate replacement windows have been ordered.

The building is owned by Vornado Realty Trust, along with a minority ownership by former president Donald Trump. Vornado officials have declined to comment.  

Christopher Wirowek was operations director for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner back in February 2019, when Adachi died at age 59.  He was found unconscious in a North Beach apartment.

Wirowek said he personally oversaw the investigation into a death police originally considered suspicious. The final official autopsy report blamed the toxic effects of cocaine and alcohol on Adachi’s already diseased heart.

“I thought I was doing the right thing, but instead I was fired,” said Wirowek in a video posted on the Facebook page of one of his attorneys. Wirowek sued the city in 2020 alleging wrongful termination. He turned down our request for an interview for this story.

In the video and the lawsuit, Wirowek says the day the autopsy report was set to be released, he got a visit from then City Administrator Naomi Kelly.

“She wanted to review the entire investigative autopsy report,” Wirowek said in the Facebook video. “She went line by line – there were some changes – and I said ‘no’….”

In court filings, Wirowek’s attorneys allege that Kelly wanted Wirowek to remove any references to cocaine and to a female companion Adachi was with before he died.

The city said in legal responses that Kelly was simply asking a couple of “innocuous” questions about references to cocaine and never asked about the companion.  Wirowek was fired several months later, the city asserts in legal filings, after being caught mishandling “highly confidential” personnel documents.

Wirowek’s attorneys contend  the document allegations were a pretext for whistleblower retaliation. Wirowek insists the true reason was his refusal to alter the autopsy report. 

“I was fired because I told Miss Kelly  ‘no.’ That I wouldn’t falsify Mr. Adachi’s  autopsy report,” Wirowek said in the attorney’s Facebook video post.  

Kelly – who has since left the city — did not respond to requests for comment, but the city initially called Wirowek’s legal claims “complete fiction.” Documents filed this week with the city, however, confirm the two sides have reached an agreement to settle the suit for $436,000. The city attorney’s office said it considers that sum “an appropriate resolution given the inherent costs of continued litigation.”

The city’s Board of Supervisors still has to formally approve the settlement before it becomes final.

The lawsuit filed Thursday names multiple defendants including the driver involved in the crash, SamTrans and its contractor MV Transportation (MV). MV operates some of SamTrans’ fleet of buses.

The accusations include claims SamTrans and MV were “negligent in the maintenance of the bus, including the headlights.” The suit also alleges the headlights on SamTrans bus 448 “were unsafe,” “failed to properly illuminate the road” and the “deficiencies were the cause of the collision which killed Sol Gloria.”

MV Transportation never responded to NBC Bay Area’s requests for comment on the lawsuit. SamTrans said it can’t comment on open litigation. In our earlier story, SamTrans’ CEO and General Manager April Chan defended the agency’s headlights saying they meet industry safety standards and are checked daily.

WATCH: ‘I Just Killed Someone’: SamTrans Is Ignoring Headlights Warnings, Bus Drivers 

Ernesto Gloria was the victim’s husband. He says his wife was taken away from him on his birthday last year.

“There must be accountability,” he said. “They are accountable to the public and their accountability is in the buses they operate.”

On Tuesday, the Investigative Unit broke the story about larger concerns surrounding the fatal collision on June 29, 2022 around 1:20 a.m.. Sol Gloria had dementia, and while police and her family were looking for her, SamTrans bus 448 hit and killed her while she was walking in the middle of El Camino Real in the Menlo Park-Atherton area.

The lawsuit filed by Gloria’s husband and daughter also accuses the driver involved in the accident of failing “to keep a proper lookout” and driving the bus “at an unsafe speed.” The police report reviewed by the Investigative Unit does not cite the driver, Jimmy Maerina, for speeding. It states Sol Gloria was at fault for the collision and that Maerina was unable to avoid making contact.

Maerina did not want to speak on camera about the lawsuit but sent a statement saying, “I was deeply saddened by that accident and the family that was involved … I was deemed not at fault by MV Transportation, SamTrans and the police department … There was no possible way to avoid making contact with her.”

NBC Bay Area also spoke with Maerina about the case before the lawsuit was filed.

“[SamTrans and MV] have to change those headlights. The headlights are the main issue here,” he said in our report on Tuesday.

The Gloria family say they still haven’t heard from SamTrans personally.

“These people who are involved in public service must also take into account that we are people with feelings, you know. And we hurt,” said Ernesto Gloria.

Candice Nguyen was the investigative reporter on this story. To contact her about this report or another story tip, email candice.nguyen@nbcuni.com.

“When I opened the [bedroom] door, she was gone,” said Jerushah. “I kept thinking, she’s probably so cold right now.”

Sol had dementia and would sometimes lose her sense of place and direction, according to Jerushah. She said her mother left the home when she was in the shower and her father was visiting a family member. The family filed a missing person’s report with San Mateo police as soon as they realized she was missing.

The 78-year-old pastor wife and mother somehow traveled more than 9 miles down El Camino Real from San Mateo towards Menlo Park-Atherton.

Around 1:20 a.m., Sol was struck by a SamTrans bus while walking in the middle of El Camino Real near Menlo College. She passed away a short time later at Stanford Hospital.

“I just killed someone,” Jimmy Maerina recalls from that night. “I have nightmares. I lost weight. I couldn’t eat. I was dehydrated.”

Maerina was the bus driver behind the wheel that night. Months after the accident, he called the Investigative Unit to speak about it for the first time.

“[SamTrans has] to change those headlights. The headlights are the main issue here,” he said.

According to the crash report, Gloria was at fault for the collision for walking in the middle of the dark road right before she was hit. But Maerina believes if he was able to see Gloria earlier, he might have had more time to react and possibly avoid her.

“I think about the family she left behind,” he said.

The Investigative Unit asked Maerina if he had reported this problem with bus headlights to his agency before.

“I have, numerous times. Been warning them for about two years now,” he responded.

Maerina said those warnings were to his supervisors at MV Transportation, a private transit company SamTrans contracts with to operate some of its fleet.

After the crash, Maerina said he elevated his concerns to SamTrans through a legal claim that stated, “For years before that day, the buses that [Maerina] was required to drive on the streets of San Mateo County were dangerous and defective in that they provided insufficient illumination.”

Last month, SamTrans rejected the claim.

The Investigative Unit independently rode a different SamTrans bus down the same route Maerina drove the night of the accident. NBC Bay Area’s team rode the bus after 1 a.m. to get a sense of similar conditions. That stretch of El Camino Real southbound before Valparaiso Avenue is very dark. That side, which borders a residential area, has far fewer streetlights than the northbound side. Watching SamTrans buses pass by, some operated by SamTrans and others by MV Transportation, it was notable that bus headlights vary in color and brightness. Some appear to be brighter, white lights while others appear to be dimmer, yellow lights.

SamTrans declined an interview for this report but said in an email: “The facts of the case do not support the claim that headlights played any role in the collision.”

After NBC Bay Area sent multiple requests for an interview, MV Transportation never responded to the requests, and SamTrans CEO and General Manager April Chan declined to talk on camera. She sent the following statement:

“Safety is always our highest priority, and we maintain rigorous standards for our vehicles and operators. This includes industry standard specifications for vehicles we purchase and daily checks for every vehicle by operators both before and after use. These daily checks include inspection of headlights. Our training and protocol require that bus operators report any issue with the bus to their transportation supervisor, including the functionality of bus headlights. It is important to note that our headlights meet industry standard requirements and are either LED or HID light bulbs, or a combination of both, neither of which dim over time like older types of light bulbs.”

Maerina disagrees there’s nothing wrong with the headlights on SamTrans buses operated by MV Transportation.

“They’re not concerned about the safety of the public. They’re just concerned about putting the buses out there,” he said.

In response to his accident, Maerina says MV Transportation sent a memo out to its bus drivers telling them to “use high beams, whenever you can. Especially at night on El Camino.” The memo acknowledged “there are many sections that are dark.”

Maerina says high beams shouldn’t be a solution and could blind oncoming cars. When the Investigative Unit asked about the memo, MV Transportation never responded, and SamTrans said the memo wasn’t authorized. The agency had their contractor remove it because it didn’t follow protocol.

Maerina is not the only bus operator with these concerns.

Over the phone and at a recent union meeting, the Investigative Unit talked to 15 bus operators who drive for SamTrans through MV Transportation. All but two said they have experienced difficulty driving at night due to headlight brightness and/or alignment issues.

“I [am] very sure [that] more incidents or accidents are coming. You no change the lights, big trouble,” bus operator Oscar Aguilar said.

“If there is nothing done to those headlights, what we complained about, I’m not going back,” said Maerina.

Jerushah and her father Ernesto Gloria are grateful Maerina has come forward with his explanation. They say SamTrans never contacted them. Samtrans says that’s because the agency was unclear who the surviving family members were, and the agency didn’t have their names and contact information.

“Their silence is deafening. They’re making me feel like my mom’s life was worthless,” Jerushah said.

Bus 448, the bus involved in the accident, is currently back in service after standard inspection and maintenance, according to SamTrans.

Candice Nguyen is the investigative reporter on this story. If you want to reach out about this story or another, email her at candice.nguyen@nbcuni.com.

Jeremiah York, 24, worked as the Director of Liturgical Ministries and the Executive Assistant to the Rector at the Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, which is also known as the Oakland Cathedral.

Walnut Creek police told NBC Bay Area that they arrested York, a Walnut Creek resident, on Jan. 6.

The case remains under investigation and has not yet been referred to the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office, according to a police spokesperson.

NBC Bay Area could not reach York for comment.

The Diocese of Oakland has not publicly announced the arrest, and York’s photo and employment information remained on the Cathedral’s website until Friday. It was then taken down shortly after NBC Bay Area’s inquiry about the arrest.

Helen Osman, a spokesperson for the Diocese of Oakland, said in an email that York is no longer employed by the Cathedral and has not worked there since the first week of January.

“In reviewing this situation, we have not discovered any potential criminal conduct by Jeremiah York in the course of his employment, or occurring on Cathedral property, utilizing its property, or involving parishioners, including minors,” Osman wrote. “No arrests have occurred on Cathedral property, and the Diocese of Oakland, which oversees the Cathedral, has cooperated with law enforcement.”

Tim Stier, a former priest with the Diocese of Oakland, said he was originally tipped off about the arrest in February by a contact within the Diocese. Stier, a longtime critic of how the Catholic Church has handled its ongoing sex abuse scandal, passed along the tip to NBC Bay Area, which confirmed the arrest late last week.

“I was just appalled and astounded by that,” Stier said. “My source didn’t want to be named, but [they] gave me permission to pursue this.”

According to Osman, York oversaw the planning and preparation of liturgies at the Cathedral and helped coordinate events such as weddings and funerals. York also worked alongside altar servers, which Osman said are almost exclusively adults at this time.

Stier said some liturgies, such as baptisms and communions, involve children, and that the Diocese has a duty to be transparent with parishioners about York’s arrest. 

“The responsibility of the Diocese goes beyond just firing him,” Stier said. “Were there announcements to all that masses? Were all the parents of children in the Cathedral notified of this? I would be very surprised if they were.”

NBC Bay Area asked the Diocese if it has notified anyone of York’s arrest, but officials did not respond to the question.

Shannon O’Connor’s preliminary hearing was scheduled for March 6 but has been postponed to April 17.

This court hearing is going to be a critical point for both the prosecution and the defense as they’re expected to lay out their cases for a judge to decide if there’s enough evidence to move forward. Witnesses, including some of the underaged teens who allegedly attended these parties, are expected to testify.

O’Connor is currently in custody awaiting trial after being charged with 39 misdemeanors and felonies related to child abuse, child endangerment, providing minors with alcohol and sexual battery. The charges stem from a series of parties and gatherings prosecutors say O’Connor hosted over a eight months period between 2020 and 2021. During the gatherings, there was excessive drinking where minors would vomit, be unable to stand and fall unconscious. On multiple occasions, there was unwanted sexual activity between some of the minors that prosecutors say O’Connor encouraged. O’Connor has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Last Friday, the Investigative Unit reported O’Connor was attacked on Oct. 24, 2022 while in custody awaiting trial. According to deputies, five other female inmates used their hands and feed to assault O’Connor in her dorm room. The attack lasted for about 16 seconds and O’Connor did not fight back, according to court documents. O’Connor was hospitalized as a result of the assault and was treated and released back to Elmwood Correctional Facility that same night.

O’Connor has since been moved to a different unit in Elmwood Correctional Facility.

Los Gatos Mar 3

Los Gatos Mom Accused of Hosting Alcohol-Fueled Teen Parties Attacked in Jail, Hospitalized

Los Gatos mom Oct 3, 2022

Los Gatos Mom Accused of Throwing Parties for Underage Teens Pleads Not Guilty

More than 200 of the clergy and lay employees of the Catholic Church named in the wave of lawsuits have never been publicly accused of being sexually abusive towards children and teenagers until now, NBC Bay Area’s investigation found. Some of the newly accused continue to work as priests.

Other alleged perpetrators named in the civil filings have faced previous accusations but now face new claims, some of them dozens.

NBC Bay Area is in the process of reaching out to those accused in the lawsuits and anticipates publishing a complete list of names at the conclusion of that process.

While most local dioceses have released internal lists of suspected child predators in recent years, the new allegations threaten the credibility of those disclosures, according to victim advocates, who argue the dioceses’ lists should be significantly longer.

“I think it just shows what a pervasive, uncontrolled disaster was happening in the Catholic Church as far as children,” said East Bay attorney Rick Simons, who is serving as the plaintiffs’ co-liaison counsel for the coordinated civil cases hitting Catholic dioceses in Northern California.

In Northern California alone, Simons said more than 1,500 lawsuits were filed against Catholic dioceses during the state’s three-year lookback window, which closed at the end of December. In 2019, state lawmakers passed the lookback law allowing childhood victims of sexual abuse to file new lawsuits in civil court, no matter when the alleged abuse occurred.

“There are more accusations against previously unidentified perpetrator priests than I think most of us anticipated,” Simons said. The Diocese of Santa Rosa and the Diocese of San Diego have already stated the legal filings could lead them into bankruptcy.

Most of the alleged abusers are priests and other clergy, but they also include lay church employees, such as teachers and coaches at Catholic schools. Although rare, a handful of nuns have also been accused.

Among the newly accused priests are some high-profile names, such as Bishop Floyd Begin, the deceased founding bishop of the Diocese of Oakland.

A lawsuit filed in December accuses Begin of sexually abusing an unnamed 12-year-old girl on a single occasion in 1968, after he had already risen to bishop.

The plaintiff’s attorney did not respond to NBC Bay Area’s request to discuss the case.

Neither did a spokesperson for the Diocese of Oakland, which has told NBC Bay Area in the past it would not comment on any active litigation.

In a previous statement, however, the Diocese said, “As Bishop Barber has stated numerous times, he continues to work with leadership in the Oakland Diocese, both lay and clergy, to address the deep scars caused by sexual abuse of children, and how we can stop abuse.”

Like most dioceses in the area, NBC Bay Area found dozens of newly accused priests tied to the Oakland Diocese who are absent from its list of priests “credibly accused” of abusing children.

The list published by Oakland Bishop Michael Barber back in 2019 currently sits at 65 names, but NBC Bay Area’s review of lawsuits revealed recent accusations against more than 30 clergy absent from that list.

One such priest is Fr. John Garcia, a longtime priest who served at a handful of East Bay parishes, including Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church in Brentwood.

That’s the church Derek Lewis, 34, attended as a child in the late 1990s after his family moved to the small town.

“He was almost like a king or something,” Lewis said of the priest revered by many in the community.

After more than two decades of coping with painful memories, Lewis filed a lawsuit in November accusing Garcia of repeatedly sexually abusing him when he was just 8 years old.

It was the first time that Garcia, now dead, had been publicly accused.

“[He] raped me dozens of times,” said Lewis, standing outside the priest’s former living quarters where he says the abuse took place.

Lewis said he sometimes tried resisting the priest, but his father was battling cancer at the time, and he said Garcia turned that pain against him.

“He would tell me that and say, ‘OK, that’s up to you, that’s your decision’” Lewis recalls the priest telling him. “But just know that, if you go against God’s will this way, he might just punish you and take your dad.”

Terry Gross, Lewis’ attorney, said at least two others have since filed lawsuits alleging Garcia sexually assaulted them. The San Francisco Chronicle first reported the claims against Garcia.

“When these individuals come forward, it’s their first step on their healing recovery, finally being to stand up and say this was wrong,” Gross said.

Lewis said the abuse later led him down a path of addiction, incarceration, and homelessness.

“I think what you find with many of these victims and survivors of this type of clergy abuse is that their lives become a spiral,” Gross said.

Now sober, holding down a steady job, and raising his 2-year-old daughter with his girlfriend, Lewis said he’s finally in a place where he can fight back.

“I feel like the church has got away with all this stuff,” Lewis said. “Like Garcia won, he beat me. The church beat me. So now, I’m not that same little naïve boy anymore.”

Lewis is one of the rare plaintiffs who is suing the church using his real name, which he hopes might give others the courage to follow in his footsteps.

“I have to take my stand against [Garcia] and against [the church] and make it known to everybody that what happened was wrong in every sort of way,” Lewis said. “If me coming forward using my name and my face can help somebody, that’s what the whole objective is.”

Grace Galletti and Madison Fishman contributed reporting on this story.

As it stands now, the tower leans 29 inches northwest at the corner of Mission and Fremont streets. Fix engineers have said the tower could ride out a major quake even if it leans five feet, but life safety systems will start to fail if tilt exceeds 40 inches.

To predict how the building will perform into the future, the fix team developed an elaborate computer model. That model estimates the fix will control further settlement and may reverse tilt by as much as 4.5 inches.

But in an analysis done for homeowners obtained by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit, independent foundation and geotechnical experts said the elaborate model fails to account for sinking and tilting triggered by a major quake. The report by Ben Turner of Dan Brown and Associates notes that while “seismic loading is obviously a critical component” of the tower’s “design and performance, the computer model uses only “non-seismic “ factors in predicting how much the tower will sink and tilt.

Another expert worries the fix could make the tower less seismically safe, not more.

“It definitely has not improved the seismic performance capability,” said structural engineer David Williams, an expert on deep foundations. The problem, he says, is the tower will be left seismically unbalanced because it will be supported to bedrock on just two sides.

“So when it starts rocking in a very large earthquake — the design earthquake —  that rocking is not very gentle rocking. It’s banging on one corner and it’s softer landing on the other side. And so it exacerbates any damage.”

Another complicating factor is the nearly forgotten underground wall that runs beneath the foundation on the east side — away from where the tower leans the most. That wall is 3-feet thick, 90 feet tall – with the top of the wall separated by a foot or so of soil from the bottom of the Millennium Tower’s 10-foot thick concrete slab foundation. It was built to act as a buffer for crews to safely dig down to build the underground parking garage next door.

Prior inspections suggest the tower is resting atop that wall in places.

But Turner’s analysis notes the computer model does not account for what role – if any– that wall could have on the tower’s settlement, tilt or tilt reversal.

“They have left out some of what may well be fairly critical steps,” said tall building foundation expert Harry Poulos about the computer model designed to predict tower performance.

The wall under the foundation to the east, Poulos said, may well explain why the tower is tilting so much to the west, where there is no wall under the structure.

He said if the tower is essentially hung up on that eastern wall, that would likely influence expected tilt reversal. It could also throw off current predictions of how the tower will behave during a major quake.

“That wall would seem to be an important component of the whole system,” Poulos said, “and if that hasn’t been considered explicitly in the model, then I can’t see how you can expect your predictions of future behavior to be accurate.”

Lead fix engineer Ron Hamburger said in a statement that his team extensively briefed a panel of city appointed experts about seismic safety and concerns raised by Dan Brown and Associates about the computer model. The city’s panel, he said, “accepted these responses and additional analyses as sufficient to predict building behavior and that of the upgrade.”

While acknowledging some gaps in the modeling analysis remain, the city’s engineering review and design team approved the current 18-pile design in July. The approval letter says the modeling method was “consistent with typical engineering design practice.”

The tower is currently supported to bedrock on six piles along Mission Street, but the piles only carry about half the planned-for load. The six piles should bolster the tower during the excavation needed to extend the existing foundation to 12 piles already installed on Fremont Street.

The current plan is to have the building fully supported on both sides by September.

The Justice for Survivors Act seeks to end the civil statute of limitations for child sexual abuse, including claims against institutions that may have enabled or covered up abuse. Under the state’s current law, survivors are required to file claims in civil court by their 40^th birthday, or in some cases, within five years after discovering their abuse as an adult.

“By eliminating the civil statute of limitations for child sexual abuse, we are helping survivors come forward to seek the critical closure they need,” Addis said in a press release issued Monday. “It’s time to end this arbitrary and cruel time limit on justice.”

The bill could have major financial ramifications for prominent institutions such as the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts of America, currently grappling with widespread and ongoing sexual abuse scandals.

Skinner said the bill would help promote healing among victims, but also hold powerful organizations accountable.

“The benefit of lifting this statute of limitations is it can bring [the abuse] to light, hold the organizations accountable and hopefully end the practice,” Skinner said. “Sunshine is a great disinfectant.”

Attorneys representing Catholic dioceses across Northern California did not immediately respond to NBC Bay Area’s request for comment.

A spokesperson for the Archdiocese of San Francisco said they had no comment on the proposed legislation.

For the past two years, NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit has interviewed dozens of alleged Catholic clergy abuse victims across the state. A recent three-year “lookback window” passed by the California state legislature in 2019 allowed victims of childhood sexual abuse to file new civil claims in court, no matter when the alleged abuse occurred. But that window just closed at the end of 2022.

More than 1,500 lawsuits were filed against the Catholic Church in Northern California alone. In nearly every case, it took decades for the accuser to come forward.

Investigative Unit Sep 28, 2022

Deceased South Bay Priest Raped Teen and Gave Him HIV, Lawsuit Alleges

Investigative Unit Sep 28, 2022

SF Archbishop Cordileone Refusing Major Step Towards Transparency in Widening Sex Abuse Scandal

Some told NBC Bay Area they couldn’t process their abuse at such a young age. Others say they were dissuaded from coming forward by their abusers, or even their own family.

Victim advocates applauded the announcement. “This bill introduction is a monumental step forward and brings much-needed awareness to reform the archaic laws that prevent survivors from coming forward and allows abusers to escape justice and hurt others,” said Mike McDonnell, a spokesperson for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

The high-rise is currently tilting more than 29 inches at the northwest corner, about a third of that lean occurring after construction began back in 2021 on work aimed at stabilizing the building.

In an email update Saturday to residents of the building, lead fix engineer Ron Hamburger said three million pounds of the building’s weight along the Mission Street side is supported by six piles that extend down to bedrock on the north side. That is about half the load the Mission Street piles will ultimately carry, he said.

The goal for now, he said, is to stabilize the tower’s north side so crews can dig much more to extend the foundation along the west side of the structure along Fremont Street. Ultimately, the building will be tied to 18 piles already sunk to bedrock, six on Mission and the balance on Fremont Street.

“The purpose of this first stage of loading” Hamburger explained in his e-mail to residents, “is to stabilize the building during the remaining construction, including the excavation along Fremont street to tie in the 12 piles already installed last year to bedrock.”

Millennium Tower Jan 19

Millennium Tower Fix to Reverse About Half the Tilting Triggered During Project, Model Predicts

Millennium Tower Nov 10, 2022

Millennium Tower Fix Shifts to Hasten Completion

Hamburger told residents he expects that just taking some weight off the building along Mission “would slow substantially, if not stop” more settlement, adding that preliminary data shows the early phase “has been successful and exceeded the engineering team’s projections.”

Once work is done extending the foundation along Fremont, crews are going to transfer 15 million pounds of weight onto the dozen piles along the west side of the tower, Hamburger said.  

Computer models designed to predict behaviorproject that the work will offset about 4.5 inches of lean at the northwest corner if all goes to plan.

But Harry Poulos, an internationally recognized tall building expert, stresses that even if the fix works as planned it will offset less than half the 10 inches of tilting caused during the fix work.

“I don’t think there’s any cause for optimism here,” Poulos said, adding: “Because it’s like in a medical procedure where you think you’re fixing the patient, and you, in fact, do something wrong and you actually make him worse.”

But Hamburger stresses the primary goal of the project has always been to ultimately stabilize the structure. Offsetting tilt, he said, has been a secondary goal.

The project is currently expected to be wrapped up by September of this year, Hamburger now says.  

For months, NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit has been talking to county doctors reporting burnout and some of their patients waiting up to six to seven months to see a specialist doctor after getting a referral. On Thursday, the team reported on a patient, William Spradlin, who said the delays he experienced with a surgery he needs to return to work caused him to lose his job, his savings and his home.

Valley Medical Center Dec 12, 2022

Some Kids Forced to Wait 6-7 Months to See Valley Medical Center Doctor: Internal Email

Santa Clara County Dec 8, 2022

Valley Medical Center Doctors Report Dangerously Long Patient Wait Times

Santa Clara Valley Healthcare, the entity operating Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, declined an interview but sent an email when our Investigative Unit asked officials to elaborate on why they say “imbalances in supply and demand” are contributing to appointment delays.

In the email, a spokesperson said one big factor is the healthcare system seeing a lot more patients because people have been deferring care during the pandemic. For instance:

• The number of Medi-Cal managed care members assigned to SCVH has grown from approximately 158,000 to 179,000, a 13.3% increase from November 2021 to November 2022
• Over a two-year period, enrollment increased by about 21.6% or 32,000 members from November 2020 to November 2022
• SCVH Emergency Department volumes have increased by 24.9% or 33,327 visits during the same period

Dr. Eon Rios is a Santa Clara Valley Medical Center doctor in the hospital’s dermatology department. He said one reason for the volume increase in the hospital’s emergency department is that some patients are having to resort to going to the E.R. after waiting so long for an appointment.

“No clinic spot is available for them. If they’re severe enough, they can go to the Emergency Department and get admitted and get those treated,” Dr. Rios said. “But there’s just no space. It is so difficult to get specialty care in a timely fashion that it behooves good patient care.”

Santa Clara Valley Healthcare’s statement to us further explains what else its doing to try and reduce wait times. They said they’ve acquired two more hospitals in San Jose and in Gilroy. And they’ve expanded construction for Santa Clara Valley Medical Center’s E.R. Department.

Some county doctors say the solution should be more focused on hiring additional physicians. The healthcare system said they’re working on recruitment and added 600 new positions last year.

William Spradlin is an aircraft mechanic. Over the course of his decades-long career he says he has worked on almost every aircraft in every country in the world. The work is labor-intensive.

“A lot of the hardware that I have to torque has to be torqued at 180 inch pounds. Some people don’t even weigh that much,” he said.

Spradlin has been feeling pain in his lower abdomen for years but says the pain became so severe last June he was forced to miss work as a contractor for a South Bay aviation company two to three days a week.

“[This job is] everything. That’s me,” he said. “I just couldn’t move … it’s just a throbbing pain. It makes you manic.”

Spradlin says he suffers from multiple hernias where he has to avoid heavy lifting, unless he gets surgery. The Investigative Unit obtained a medical record showing a referral for General Surgery from his primary doctor.

“He sends me to a specialist and weeks go by. So when I finally got this [referral] letter that they had approved the surgery, I was excited. And then I was told that they didn’t have a service provider, and that they haven’t had one since April,” Spradlin said.

Santa Clara County Dec 8, 2022

Valley Medical Center Doctors Report Dangerously Long Patient Wait Times

Valley Medical Center Dec 12, 2022

Some Kids Forced to Wait 6-7 Months to See Valley Medical Center Doctor: Internal Email

Spradlin reached out to NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit after he saw our earlier reports about Valley Medical Center doctors reporting burnout and their patients having to wait upwards of six to seven months to see a physician. In some cases, the doctors said patient safety was put at risk. At least one of the patients was identified as child at the hospital’s gastroenterology department.

“I was literally in awe [seeing those reports]. You guys were talking about me … I’m not the only one,” Spradlin said.

In Spradlin’s case, he said the hospital told him to call back to set up an consultation in October. When he did that, they tried to schedule an appointment for Nov. 1 and then immediately rescheduled it for Nov. 15, he said. Nov. 15 is when he got his first consultation for hernia surgery. During that meeting, the doctor told him he needed to lose weight before the procedure.

“That would’ve been great to know in August, you know. Or June!” he said.

Spradlin says he tried going to other hospitals, but the providers wouldn’t take his insurance. As a contractor, he has Valley Health Plan (VHP) insurance, which is owned and operated by Santa Clara County.

When the Investigative Unit reached out to Santa Clara County and Santa Clara Valley Healthcare, the entity that operates Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, about Spradlin’s case, county hospital officials declined an interview citing privacy concerns. A spokesperson sent a statement saying, “Insured patients have many other options within their network and can seek care outside the system if the wait time is of concern.”

Spradlin says, in his case, that wasn’t true.

“Insurance wouldn’t do it. My doctor even said ‘good luck.’ He got on the phone. He called [other] doctors and asked them do they take this insurance?  Can you take this insurance? Is there a way we can get you to take this insurance? [They said] no,” he said.

Since his consultation, Spradlin has dropped most of the weight he was told to lose, but he’s still waiting for his procedure. In October, he says his employer didn’t renew his contract, and he can’t get another job because he has to report injuries in his line of work.

“I lost all my savings. I’m homeless. I’m forced to live with my brother now and his family,” Spradlin said.

In their statement to the Investigative Unit, Santa Clara Valley Healthcare said, “… like all systems, we experience imbalances in supply and demand from time to time, and patients may occasionally need to wait longer than they would like for non-urgent care.”

“Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, many patients deferred their health care needs, adding to the increasing number of patients now seeking care. In addition, there is an increasing number of individuals on government-subsided health coverage programs in Santa Clara County, with Medi-Cal enrollment alone increasing 7.2% in the past year (up 30,737 enrollees from June 2021 to June 2022) and 17.5% in two years (up 68,634 from June 2020 to June 2022),” a Santa Clara Valley Healthcare spokesman added.

Santa Clara Valley Healthcare recently purchased other hospitals and added construction to help address patient delay issues. Last year, they added more than 600 new positions as they continue to actively recruit.

Patient delay issues still persist, however. Santa Clara Valley Healthcare says their current median wait time for routine referrals to General Surgery is around 40 days. According to the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, the maximum wait time for a General Surgery specialist should be 30 days.

We asked how these delays have impacted Spradlin’s life.

“It’s ruined it,” he said.

Chunli Zhao, 66, was arrested about two hours after the shooting as he sat in his parked car in the Half Moon Bay Sheriff’s substation lot. Those sources tell us they quickly recovered a Glock semiautomatic handgun, several rounds of ammo as well as a goodbye note Zhao wrote to his wife.

In what sources describe as a “matter of fact” note, the suspect allegedly acknowledged having shot eight people and urged his wife to take care of their adult child living in China. Part of the scribbled note is still being deciphered, according to sources.

They also say Zhao insisted he didn’t know anything about the weekend mass shooting that left 11 dead in Monterey Park in Southern California.

Half Moon Bay Mass Shooting Jan 24

Half Moon Bay Shooting Scenes: 2 Separate Businesses, 1 Has Troubled Past

Half Moon Bay Mass Shooting Jan 24

Half Moon Bay Mass Shooting: How to Help

The operators who took over the farm where the first of the two shootings occurred, California Terra Garden, said Tuesday that they saw no indication of a workplace problem before the shooting. “No issues, no indication he was capable of anything like that,’’ said spokesman David Oates. 

But Sheriff Christina Corpus said Tuesday that’s the direction the investigation is going. 

“All of the evidence we have points to this being the instance of workplace violence,” the sheriff said.

Investigators with knowledge of the case say that in an interview, the suspect recounted becoming enraged after he complained to a co-worker he considered his boss, outside a row of a dozen trailers and the wooden outbuilding where the suspect lived with his wife.

The investigators told our investigative Unit that Zhao told them he felt the co-worker dismissed his concerns and rode off on his bicycle to another part of the farm. About 30 minutes later, according to sources, the suspect told them he shot the co-worker along with a second farm worker near a greenhouse on the farm property.

After the initial double shooting, our sources say they believe the suspect returned to the farm’s trailer encampment and shot and killed the first targeted co-worker’s wife in her trailer. Authorities believe he then went to another trailer to hunt down another co-worker who he believed had “disrespected” him, shooting that man in his sleep, and wounding another co-worker in the same trailer.

Investigators say Zhao told them he then drove to a nearby, separate mushroom farm on Cabrillo Road where he had previously worked. That’s where they believe he sought out and killed a former co-worker, that worker’s wife, and a third former co-worker. 

Authorities say Zhao had been in the U.S. on a work visa and had no prior criminal record. He purchased the Glock handgun locally about two years before the attack. Investigators interviewed Zhao’s wife, who allegedly said she knew nothing about a shooting plan.

After strange and conflicting information about the death of a dementia resident at Atria Walnut Creek, a Contra Costa County senior care home, NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit obtained the man’s coroner’s report to find out what exactly caused his death.

Since the Investigative Unit broke the story about 94-year-old Constantine Canoun’s death on August 31, Atria Senior Living, the company that owns and operates Atria Walnut Creek, has publicly insisted his medical emergency was food-related. The victim’s son said facility managers told him his father had a bad reaction to eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in the middle of the night.

In a September 2, 2022 statement Atria Senior Living provided, the company said, “It is our belief that this was a food related reaction … We do not believe the resident ingested any cleaning fluid or any chemicals.”

That information is not accurate, according to the Contra Costa County Coroner’s Office.

In Canoun’s coroner’s report released Monday, the cause of his accidental death is listed as “caustic injury to pharynx, esophagus and stomach … [due to] ingestion of liquid cleaning agent.”

“Atria [Senior Living] should be embarrassed for keeping up this charade with the family about the Hot Cheetos,” said Kathryn Stebner, Canoun’s family attorney in their civil case against the senior care company. “It’s a slap in the face.”

Canoun’s incident happened just days before workers at Atria Senior Living’s San Mateo location accidentally poisoned three other dementia residents. The company admits staff in San Mateo accidentally served cleaning fluid to those seniors mistaking it for fruit juice.

Trudy Maxwell and Peter Shroeder died as a result. Their families are suing Atria Senior living in civil court and the cases are ongoing. The status of the third victim is unclear.

Canoun’s son said, in his father’s case, Atria Senior Living denied it was anything like what happened in San Mateo. He believes the company’s months-long characterization of his father’s incident, including claiming it was caused by Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, was ridiculous.

“My experience over the last 35 years of having cases against these facilities is that … a long-term care facility will fight something tooth and nail and will not admit wrongdoing,” Stebner said.

NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit reached out to Atria Senior Living Monday. The company declined an interview but provided this statement:

On the night of August 23, 2022, staff at the Atria Walnut Creek community observed a resident who was in distress. Staff immediately contacted 911, alerted the resident’s family, and the resident was transferred to the hospital. Sadly, the resident later passed away.

Today, the Contra Costa County Coroner’s Office issued a report, which we are in the process of reviewing, that classifies the death as accidental with a finding that the cause of death was “caustic injury to pharynx, esophagus, and stomach.”

We take any case of resident injury or death seriously. We have taken appropriate steps in response to this incident, including reviewing and reinforcing our training and policies on chemical safety. Our deepest sympathies remain with the resident’s family and all other families and staff affected by this.

Stebner said Atria Senior Living’s early characterization of Canoun’s death as food-related is going to backfire.

“This is going to just strengthen our resolve. This is going to be tried in a courtroom,” she said.

NBC Bay Area is waiting to hear back from the Walnut Creek Police Department about their investigation into the case. The Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office said the case has not be referred to them as of Monday.  

This is the same route that ACE Train uses on what is essentially a parallel track.

While the road was considered too dangerous for cars until Friday, Union Pacific Railroad decided the tracks were safe for ACE trains.

Niles Canyon Jan 18

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Earlier this week, two landslides less than 24 hours apart, shut down the train service.

It’s also left many people wondering why the trains were even allowed to operate?

Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban has been digging into the situation and has the full report in the video above.

Crews are now excavating around the Fremont Street side of the building as they prepare to shore up the high-rise to bedrock on the two sides where it’s leaning the most – tying it to six steel piles along Mission Street and 12 along Fremont.

“No building should really have that sort of tilt, not a modern building of this nature,” says Harry Poulos, an internationally recognized expert on tall building foundations. Currently, the tower is leaning 29.3 inches at the northwest corner, with more than a third of the tilt coming after crews started to install piles along two sides of the building.

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Recently, a resident videotaped an experiment to show what the tilt looks like on the inside – twice rolling a marble uphill, toward the center of a unit near the corner of the building leaning the most. Both times, the marble quickly ran out of steam and came back toward that northwest corner.

“If I was a resident, I’d still be worried that I can’t put something on the table without it rolling off,” Poulos said.

While the fix was billed as providing some relief, it turns out that the fix engineers’ latest computer model shows the construction project will only offset about 4.5 inches of lean, less than half the roughly ten inches of tilt triggered so far during construction.

The model projects that once it is secured, the tower will permanently tilt about two feet at the northwest corner.

Lead fix engineer Ronald Hamburger said in a statement that the primary objectives “have always been to arrest building settlement at the northwest corner … and stop tilting by transferring a portion of the building’s weight to bedrock. Recovery of some of the tilt that has already occurred is a secondary benefit, not a primary objective.”

City-appointed experts are satisfied with the model’s conclusions, Hamburger said in the statement. But some critics fear that the model’s predictions could be overly optimistic.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” said David Williams, a deep foundation expert who worries that computer analysis doesn’t specifically simulate the factors that triggered the construction related sinking. He also worries the tower ended up tilting more than the model predicted last year.

“There’s a lot of factors that they have not accounted for,” Williams said.

Residents NBC Bay Area talked to said they are still coming to grips with the reality that the tower will likely lean forever. If all goes as planned now, the tower foundation is expected to be extended and supported to bedrock on two sides by this spring.

The woman said she handed over her purebred German Shepherd to a trainer and got back a different dog instead.

NBC Bay Area Investigative Reporter Hilda Gutierrez has more in the video report above.

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Last Friday, the California Attorney General’s Office secured a preliminary injunction after alleging negligent care of patients and other violations of state and federal law at 19 skilled nursing facilities operated by Mariner Health Care, more than half of which are located in the Bay Area.

All 19 facilities were named in connection to the discharge allegations. Five were also accused of being illegally understaffed. The temporary injunction is the result of a 2021 lawsuit filed by the Attorney General’s Office and district attorneys from Alameda, Marin, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles Counties.

“I’m glad that they did this, but this is the tip of the iceberg,” said Patricia McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. “This has been a problem in California for some time. When you have a weak enforcement system, this is going to be the result.”

According to the lawsuit, understaffed facilities led to the harm of residents, the spread of disease and unreported sexual assault cases. Mariner also allegedly falsified staffing numbers to government regulators in an attempt to improve their published ratings.

In response to the injunction, Mariner sent a statement saying, “Mariner Health Care remains committed to providing the best possible 24-hour care to ensure the ongoing safety and well-being of our residents. We are reviewing the court’s ruling and evaluating whether to appeal the preliminary injunction.”

NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit dug into the company’s inspection records from 2022, which revealed a long list of issues at 10 Bay Area facilities operated by Mariner. According to records from the California Department of Public Health, inspectors found more than 170 deficiencies at those facilities last year and issued seven fines totaling nearly $20,000.

In two separate cases, residents left the building without supervision. One was hit by a car, and another was found eating rocks and dirt. In another case, a resident’s foot had to be amputated after inspectors say a wound wasn’t properly treated or monitored. Other deficiencies included dirty kitchens, medication errors, and other patient care issues, according to the records.

While the Diocese remains silent, a letter written by Castillo in the wake of his suspension, and exclusively obtained by NBC Bay Area recently, sheds new light on the priest’s frame of mind just before he left the country. Castillo maintains his innocence and blames another priest for his suspension.

The news about Castillo broke on January 30, 2019, when Barber wrote an internal letter to members of the Diocese, telling them Castillo had been accused of sexual abuse and had been placed on leave. 

Before dawn the next morning, the Diocese also made the announcement in a public press release. Yet according to Oakland police, it took another five hours after the press release went out for the Diocese to file a police report.

The Castillo affair led to questions about whether the Diocese may have violated mandated reporting laws after church officials delayed reporting the abuse allegations to police until a day after Oakland Bishop Michael Barber placed the priest on administrative leave. It’s also still unclear when the Diocese first received notice that Castillo, a high-ranking priest, may have abused a child.

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A month after Castillo was placed on leave, he left the country, according to the Diocese. Church officials say they still don’t know the priest’s current whereabouts. NBC Bay Area has been unable to contact Castillo since the abuse allegations were first made public.

The Diocese of Oakland did not respond to questions from NBC Bay Area about its handling of the Castillo incident, only to say they still can’t get in touch with him.

“We have not had any contact with Father Castillo since February 2019 and do not know where he is or how to contact him,” Diocese spokesperson Helen Osman wrote in an email. “Therefore, we have no updates to provide.”

To the outrage of victim advocates, Castillo remains absent from the Diocese’s list of East Bay priests with credible sexual abuse allegations, and church officials have steadfastly declined to divulge the findings from their internal probe in the accusations. 

“They’ve never been fully transparent about it,” said former East Bay priest Tim Stier, a longtime critic of how the Catholic Church and its leaders have handled the clergy abuse scandal.

Despite the lack of answers from the Diocese, NBC Bay Area recently learned new details about the case after Oakland police provided limited information in response to a list of written questions. 

NEW DETAILS

Among the new details released by police: The accusation against Castillo involved not one but two possible victims, both of whom were minors at the time. And the alleged abuse occurred between 2011 and 2014, somewhere outside the City of Oakland and not on church property. 

But police say the alleged victims never cooperated with the criminal investigation, so no criminal charges were ever filed against the priest.

Even so, questions remain about how the Diocese and Bishop Barber handled reporting the Castillo allegations to police.

Stier said the Diocese has an obligation to be more transparent about Castillo and whether it believes the priest to be a potential danger to the public.

“I don’t like how they’ve handled it at all,” Stier said.

Clergy members are considered by law to be mandated reporters, required to immediately, or as soon as possible, report potential child abuse to authorities. 

Victim advocates were outraged and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) issued a press release seeking an investigation into the Diocese for violating mandated reporting requirements.

“It’s really suspicious,” said SNAP leader Joey Piscitelli at the time. “And they’re not telling us where the allegation came from.”

Despite the controversy, Oakland police recently confirmed to the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit it never initiated an investigation into whether church officials violated mandated reporting laws.

Less than a month after Castillo was accused of abuse, according to the Diocese, the priest seemed to vanish. Church officials filed a missing persons report with police in February, 2019.

OAKLAND POLICE DEPARTMENT INVESTIGATION

A week went by before Oakland police told the Diocese that Castillo, a native of Costa Rica, had been located somewhere outside the country. But according to the Diocese, police wouldn’t say exactly where he was found.

Now, Oakland police say the department never located Castillo, but rather the FBI advised them of his potential location. 

A Department spokesperson also said officers were never able to make contact with Castillo before he left the country, but declined to state when or how those officers attempted to track the priest down.

Not one to take the Diocese’s official narrative as gospel, Stier did some investigating of his own when the Castillo news broke. He got his hands on a letter written by the priest to other clergy members in the weeks following his 2019 suspension. 

FATHER CASTILLO’S LETTER

“[In the letter] he’s expressing his absolute desolation,” Stier said.

Stier said he obtained a copy of the letter from an active East Bay priest when it began circulating around the Diocese. Neither the Diocese of Oakland nor the Oakland Police Department answered NBC Bay Area’s questions about the letter or its authenticity.

“I died the day Bishop Barber told me somebody made an accusation against me and I was put on administrative leave,” Castillo’s letter begins. Castillo goes on to call the situation “a misunderstanding,” and writes “proving my innocence requires a process I am not strong enough to undertake.”

Castillo also appears to blame another priest, who NBC Bay Area is not naming, for the allegations against him.

“Sadly, I think the mind behind this is a priest,” Castillo wrote. “Who since his time in Fremont was trying to manipulate people against me.”

Castillo goes on to say that the Diocese is “treating me as a criminal” and that the Bishop got “angry and distant” after the allegation. He ends the letter saying, “I trust that our merciful lord will be the one showing me the compassion I couldn’t find on Earth.”

Stier points out there’s no mention of any alleged victims.

“There’s nothing about the victim,” Stier said. “Now, he’s saying that he’s innocent of the charges, but he doesn’t mention the victim at all.”

Four years after Castillo’s suspension, Stier and other victim advocates continue to raise questions about the priest, his current location, and whether he’s a potential danger.

At a recent press conference outside the Diocese of Oakland where advocates demanded more transparency from the Bishop, Stier was present, holding a sign saying, “Where is Alexander Castillo?”

“Anything we learn about it, we have to either learn on our own or we get it begrudgingly when they cannot hold it back any longer,” Stier said.

Most of the accusations go back decades, some as far back as the 1950s.

Over the past four years, NBC Bay Area has interviewed nearly a dozen alleged victims of childhood clergy abuse, hoping to better understand their experience. For nearly all of them, the journey to speak out took decades.

For Steven Chavez, who alleges in a recent lawsuit he was given HIV after being raped by a South Bay priest as a teenager, it came down to his devout parents.

“They asked me not to embarrass them, not to embarrass the church,” said Chavez, who waited more than four decades to publicly tell his story. 

When asked why he’s coming forward now, Chavez said, “Because my parents are dead and I can do it.”

Others, like Rick Pfisterer, said they were called liars when they tried to confide their secret in someone as children. 

“The priest had gotten my home phone number and talked to my dad prior to me getting home and telling him what was going on,” Pfisterer said. “And I got beat for lying to him. And so I never said another word to anyone, ever.”

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According to UCLA Professor Paul Abramson, an expert on psychological trauma, there are often common hurdles that victims of childhood clergy abuse must overcome before deciding to come forward.

“It has to do with three basic factors, the first of which is that these kids are, by and large, from devout families,” said Abramson, who believes children from such families are more likely to view priests as authority figures or God’s messenger on Earth. “It also makes it very difficult for them to come forward.”

Abramson said abusing priests also groom their victims to establish a close bond and reduce the chances of disclosure. 

Age, he said, is also a factor.

“[Children] don’t know what to make of it,” Abramson said. “They’re frightened as hell. Sometimes they’re bleeding, they’re in pain. It’s overwhelming. They shut down and they try to find every way to not remember it.”

The psychological trauma can last a lifetime, according to Abramson, often with devastating outcomes.

“They’re often severely depressed, suicidal,” Abramson said. “They feel they have nowhere to turn. And a lot of self-medicating.”

It’s something Rick Pfisterer knows well, who said he’s struggled with addiction and urges to harm himself until meeting his wife, who he calls his savior. 

“I’ve tried to [overdose] my whole life, until I met my wife,” said Pfisterer, also now suing the Church. “I can’t outrun the memories, so I might as well stand up to them.”

The three-year “lookback” window for alleged victims to file lawsuits closes at the end of this year. Hundreds of lawsuits have already been filed in Northern California alone, and attorneys expect a flurry of activity over the final days.

Attorneys representing the Church have argued the current lookback window is unconstitutional, and that it could mean Catholic dioceses across California could be on the hook for “potentially billions of dollars in retroactive punitive damages.”

Victim advocates say such windows are critical because the statute of limitations on civil claims often runs out before victims are ready to come forward. Many argue the statute of limitations should be thrown out altogether in such cases. 

San Jose resident John Salberg knows what it’s like for victims now coming forward for the first time. He and some former classmates sued the Church 20 years ago during a similar lookback window in 2003, after he says they were molested by a priest at school in the 1970s. 

“We’re going to tell what happened and we’ll fight through the shame,” Salberg recalls thinking at the time.

To this day, he vividly remembers telling his church about it for the first time in the wake of the Boston clergy abuse scandal.

“They kept saying, ‘Boston, New York, LA,’ you know? ‘It’s everywhere but here,’” Salberg said. “I just grabbed the mic in front of all these people and said, ‘I’m really sorry to tell you guys this, but this happened to me, and it happened to a number of your sons.”

Salberg’s lawsuit against the Archdiocese of San Francisco resulted in a $1.5 million jury award. Around the same time, Salberg wrote a letter to then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, which he still has, about his experience.

“It has cost me some friendships and some popularity,” Salberg wrote. “As difficult as it’s been, I’d do it all over again.”

He said society often pictures victims as the adults they are today, rather than the vulnerable children they were when they were abused.

“They look at us now and they have a perception of an adult, you know, who’s confident and has the ability to speak their mind and everything else,” Salberg said. “Well, that’s not who got molested. Who got molested was the innocent little boy.”

In an interview with NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit, Lorna Allen accused former police lieutenant Derek Hendry of sexually assaulting her multiple times over a period of years as he patrolled Mendocino County for two different law enforcement agencies.

“He ruined my life,” Allen said. “On a regular basis, every time he did that to me.”

For the first time, Allen is publicly sharing details about the abuse she says Hendry inflicted on her, first while employed as a deputy for the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, and later, as a lieutenant with the Willits Police Department.

According to Allen, the abuse began around 2015 and continued on-and-off for five years, totaling roughly a dozen encounters. In some instances, Allen said she was forced to perform oral sex on Hendry. In another, she said she was forced to have sex with him inside his police vehicle.

NBC Bay Area has attempted to reach Hendry multiple times by phone and through a letter sent to the address listed on property records as his home. So far, he has not responded.

“I suffer every day, every day.” Allen said. “There are so many times that I wanted to kill myself rather than be afraid to walk out my door and get in my vehicle because he might be on duty, and he might want what he wanted. He’s a monster.”

Willits Police Chief Fabian Lizarraga said his department has received multiple reports of criminal conduct by Hendry. However, he declined to divulge the nature of those alleged crimes or comment on whether any of the complaints came from Allen.

To avoid a potential conflict of interest stemming from Willits police investigating one of their own, Lizarraga said they turned over the criminal investigation to the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, which served a search warrant on Hendry’s Ukiah home in August.

Few details have emerged from police since.

According to Allen, however, she filed a report with the Willits Police Department accusing Hendry of sexual assault and has been in contact with investigators.

The Lake County Sheriff’s Department also declined to comment on Allen’s claims, or whether the accusations are tied to the criminal investigation that prompted them to search Hendry’s home.

However, NBC Bay Area viewed text messages and emails sent to Allen from the Willits Police Department and Lake County Sheriff’s Department which appear to confirm she’s involved in a case that’s currently under investigation.

Hendry was fired in June after serving more than three years with the Willits Police Department according to Lizarraga, who declined to state the reason behind the termination. Two months later, Hendry’s home was searched by police.

A spokesperson for the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, where Hendry previously worked, told NBC Bay Area the criminal investigation is tied to allegations of sexual misconduct but declined to state additional details.

“The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office was unaware of any misconduct of this nature while Derek Hendry was employed with the Sheriff’s Office during his public safety career,” said Captain Gregory Van Patten in an emailed statement. “We believe the investigation by the Lake County Sheriff’s Office is necessary because of the severity of the alleged misconduct which was reported to them recently.”

The status of that criminal investigation remains murky.

The Lake County Sheriff’s Office told NBC Bay Area it wrapped up its criminal investigation into Hendry more than two months ago, on Oct. 6, and turned the findings over to Willits police. But the Willits Police Department still won’t discuss the case.

So far, Hendry has not been charged with any crimes, and as of Wednesday morning, the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office said the case had not been referred to them.

Allen recently moved out of Willits, saying she no longer feels safe in the town where she once found sanctuary. She said she’s struggling to get on her feet and doesn’t have permanent housing, mostly living out of her car.

“Law enforcement has to be held accountable,” Allen said. “They’re supposed to hold themselves to a higher standard than a normal citizen, and they don’t.”

Allen said she first met the former officer after past struggles with drug abuse led her into trouble with the law, including arrests for theft.

“It was when he was taking me down to the jail when he said, ‘you know, we can make some of this go away,’” Allen said. “And I said, ‘well, what do you mean? I’m not going to give you any information?’”

Hendry responding by saying, “Well, there are other things,” according to Allen, who said she responded by saying, “No, take me to jail.”

About a year later, Allen says Hendry made a similar offer while arresting her again, which she also refused.

According to Allen, Hendry took her cell phone number after she was released on her own recognizance. Soon after, she says he began sending her messages, like the one telling her to meet him at the end of a remote road in Willits because he had something urgent to discuss with her.

“He forced me to give him oral sex,” Allen said.

Allen said Hendry was in uniform during every assault.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in plain clothes,” said Allen, who believes Hendry purposely used his power as a police officer to intimidate her into complying with his demands.

“He used that to his advantage. Being in law enforcement and using his badge to hide behind and to dangle in front of somebody who has a criminal record, who could possibly go to prison.”

Allen isn’t the only one now speaking out publicly against Hendry.

More than a year ago, former police officer Trent James, who worked alongside Hendry at both the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office and the Willits Police Department, began releasing a series of videos on YouTube under the title: “Confessions of an ex-Cop.”

“Part of my goal here is to open up everybody’s eyes,” James said in an interview with NBC Bay Area.

James has posted more than 35 videos so far, totaling nearly 10 hours, where he dishes about controversies and corruption within Mendocino County law enforcement. Multiple videos focus on Derek Hendry, who James said was his former partner with the sheriff’s department, and later, his supervisor at the Willits Police Department.

“He should have never been a cop to begin with,” James says in an April video he titled, “Willits Police Lieutenant Finally Fired.”

Lorna Allen says watching those online videos, particularly the one about Hendry’s termination, helped lend her the courage to come forward.

“He’s not a cop anymore,” Allen said. “He can’t pull up in his police car, in his police uniform behind the badge.”

In August, James uploaded another video to YouTube, saying his former colleague is also facing sexual misconduct allegations. James said he learned about the allegations after speaking with Allen, which she confirms.

James was only with the Willits Police Department for less than four months. He said he was unjustly let go during his probationary phase, and showed NBC Bay Area a termination letter that said he “failed to meet minimum standards.”

James said his termination is not the driving motivation behind his videos.

“I’d be lying if there weren’t some small elements of that,” James said. “However, just with everything that’s going on in this country regarding transparency in the law enforcement world, I truly believe it would be a disservice to the community that I lived and grew up in, as well as all my friends that still have to work for these shady departments, to not say something.”

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That window closes at the end of the year and attorneys expect a flurry of activity over the next two weeks.

It often takes decades for survivors to come forward, advocates and researchers say, and many never will.

We wanted to better understand what victims now coming forward for the first time might be experiencing, so we spoke to John Salberg, who sued the Church 20 years ago after being abused as a child by a Bay Area priest.

Salberg said coming forward came with a cost, but he was driven to help stop abuse within the church and demand transparency from its leaders.

A superseding indictment returned Tuesday by a grand jury added four new criminal counts against Joseph Huffaker, including impersonating a federal officer and falsifying records in a federal investigation. 

Prosecutors say Huffaker and at least one other officer posed as ATF agents during traffic stops where they illegally seized weed from drivers on the side of the highway, and later falsified records to cover up the corruption. 

“It’s been a long time, five years ago this month,” said Zeke Flatten, who says Huffaker and a yet unidentified second individual robbed him of three pounds of marijuana in December 2017 while impersonating ATF agents during a traffic stop along Highway 101. “I’m satisfied. I’m satisfied that they’re being held accountable.”

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The new indictment sheds additional light on the government’s case against Huffaker but offered no clues pointing to the identifies of other yet unnamed officers who prosecutors say may have played a role in the thefts.

“I have faith that the Justice Department is doing a diligent job in their investigation and if the evidence will get them there, I believe that they’ll indict those individuals, too,” Flatten said.

Huffaker was originally indicted more than a year ago alongside another former Rohnert Park police officer, Brendon “Jaycee” Tatum, on counts of extortion under the color of right and conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right, accused of using their police powers to shake down motorists transporting cannabis.

Both officers were members of the department’s drug interdiction team, which Tatum took charge of in 2016, according to prosecutors.

Tatum pled guilty to three felonies last year, but Huffaker continues to maintain his innocence. He declined to comment on the new indictment as he left the courtroom with his attorney Wednesday afternoon.

The new charges come with an additional 33 years of potential prison time for Huffaker, who spent seven years with the department before resigning in 2019 amid a cloud of scandal.

Flatten went public with his story to independent Humboldt County journalist Kym Kemp in February 2018 and filed reports with federal law enforcement agencies. 

According to prosecutors, the public scrutiny led Tatum and Huffaker to falsify a police report and issue a bogus Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety press release in an attempt to discredit Flatten’s account and throw federal agents off their trail.

Until now, only Tatum had been charged with falsifying records, one of the counts he pled guilty to last year.

Flatten and three Mendocino County marijuana farmers filed a RICO conspiracy lawsuit in federal court last year alleging widespread theft, corruption, and cover-ups among law enforcement officers policing the Emerald Triangle. 

A judge has since dismissed the lawsuit but Flatten and the other plaintiffs are appealing.

“We’ve painstakingly gone through all the records we could find,” said Dan McNevin, a survivor of clergy abuse and one of the architects behind SNAP’s list, detailing his process of combing through court filings, news reports and other publicly available sources for bits of new information.

Currently standing at 227 names, the list just published by SNAP is more than three-times longer than the list of alleged abusers Oakland Bishop Michael Barber published in 2019, which includes priests deemed to have been “credibly accused” of abusing children by an internal diocesan review board. 

“I think the reason [the Diocese’s list] is short is because the more names that are on that list, the more survivors are triggered to come forward,” McNevin said.

More than two decades removed from the clergy sex scandal that exploded in Boston and sent shockwaves worldwide, victim advocates say the church still hasn’t come clean about abuse within its ranks, and cite the Diocese of Oakland as an example.

“There are so many secrets, so much hidden, that you can’t really trust anything that’s said,” McNevin said.

While the Oakland Diocese’s list only includes priests or religious order brothers “credibly accused’ of sexually abusing minors, SNAP takes a broader approach, also including lay church employees or priests alleged to have abused adults. 

“The Bishop of Oakland has said he’s committed to accountability, but we never see him at events like this,” said Tim Stier, a former Oakland priest whose long been critical of the how the Diocese has handled the sex abuse scandal. “In order for him to release more names [of accused priests], it’s like pulling teeth.”

The Diocese of Oakland has not responded to multiple requests for comment since Monday evening on SNAP’s new list, and why it’s so much longer than its own.

Following Monday’s rally, McNevin and other advocates attempted to hand deliver their list and an accompanying letter to Bishop Barber but were met with a closed door.

Moments later, a black Mercedes pulled up, its driver telling the advocates they weren’t allowed on church property. The unidentified driver said he would deliver SNAP’s letter to the Bishop. 

Reporting from NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit has also raised questions about the Diocese of Oakland’s list of alleged abusers. 

A 2019 law opened a three-year window for Californians to file new claims in civil court based on older child sex abuse accusations that would typically be barred by the statute of limitations. 

NBC Bay Area’s review of those court filings found more than a dozen East Bay priests and church officials, none still active, now facing abuse allegations in civil court for the first time. So far, they have not been added to Bishop Barber’s list, but they are included on SNAP’s.

The Diocese hasn’t responded to inquiries asking how they would review those new claims, consistently saying they would not comment on any pending litigation.

One such example is now-deceased San Leandro priest Msgr. Michael McGinty, who former altar boy Mark Staley alleged in a recent lawsuit choked and sexually abused him when he was eight or nine years old.

“The next thing I remember, his hands were here on my throat,” Staley said. “I recall passing out, and when I woke, I was looking down and I could see the top of his head.”

One of the East Bay’s longest serving priests, Msgr. John McCracken, was also accused in a recent lawsuit, but remains absent from Oakland’s list. McCracken, who died in 2012, was accused of raping a young boy multiple times between 1972 and 1974.

“I was crippled with very deep depression and anxiety for years, for decades,” McCracken’s accuser, who does not want to be identified, told NBC Bay Area in a 2021 interview. “It’s only from 30 years of doing therapy and many years of group therapy and recovery meetings that I’ve got to the point where I can actually have a voice for myself.”

There are also examples of priests accused in more recent years, such as Fr. Alexander Castillo, who Bishop Barber placed on leave in 2019 after receiving reports he abused at least two minors between 2011 and 2014.

According to the Diocese, Castillo left the country soon after they announced his suspension, and NBC Bay Area has been unable to reach him. The priest was never criminally charged because police say the alleged victims declined to cooperate in the probe.

Castillo remained on leave as of earlier this year and a spokesperson for the Diocese recently told NBC Bay Area they still can’t reach him. Yet, he’s absent from their list of accused abusers and the spokesperson has declined to state why that is.

“I would love to know why Bishop Barber has not put this guy on this list,” McNevin said.

SNAP says they’re calling on Bishop Barber to review the list they just presented, and expand the list published by the Diocese. They welcome a meeting with Barber, they say, but so far, that hasn’t happened.

“I think the only thing that will really cause systemic change will be secular authorities coming down on these bishops and forcing them to be open,” McNevin said.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has an ongoing investigation into clergy abuse, but his office recently declined to comment on its status. 

His office encourages potential victims to report abuse using the email address ClergyAbuse@doj.ca.gov.

“It’s a continuum of care to treat this epidemic illness in society,” Supervisor Hillary Ronen told a crowd of supporters along the steps of City Hall. “We need to do everything we can to help and these proven centers are just a step in that process.”

Ronen said she has “veto-proof” support from the majority of the Board of Supervisors to push ahead with calls to hold a hearing to investigate why the city isn’t further along in opening up supervised injection sites, which have also been dubbed “wellness hubs.” In addition, Ronen said the board will request $5.5 million in city funds be dedicated toward opening wellness hubs in neighborhoods hardest hit by overdose deaths and open-air drug dealing.

In September, the city’s department of health and the mayor’s office unveiled “a strategic roadmap to address drug overdose deaths,” which noted plans to open a supervised injection site by the end of this year, followed by the addition of two more centers in 2023. Those plans, however, are now on hold, according to a mayor’s office spokesperson, as the city continues to wait on legal guidance from the federal government.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has long maintained that supervised injection sites violate federal law, meaning anyone using them or even working inside could face prosecution.

While Mayor London Breed has continually said she supports the centers, her administration maintains it is not ready to move forward with opening sites in the city until the federal government releases specific guidelines and an actual framework that would provide the centers legal cover to operate.

“There remains serious legal issues that have not been addressed for city operated or city funded sites … including the potential criminal liability for city employees, including the possibility of people losing their medical licenses,” Breed told the city’s Board of Supervisors when questioned about the issue during Tuesday’s board meeting. “I believe in overdose prevention programs, but we continue to wait for this guidance and we are working aggressively with the Department of Justice on this issue.”

While San Francisco had long hoped to open the nation’s first supervised injection sites, New York opened its own centers last year. Similar sites have been operating in other countries for decades in an effort to reduce drug overdose deaths. To better understand how these centers work, the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit traveled to Canada in 2018 to get a firsthand look at the sites and speak directly with center staff and drug users who utilize the facilities. Today, Vancouver has roughly a dozen supervised injection sites.

In an April letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Breed wrote, “we urge you to issue a public statement on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice to institute a new policy that deprioritizes federal enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act against medically supervised overdose prevention programs.”

The mayor’s office had expected to receive those new guidelines earlier this year, according to a mayor’s office spokesperson, but is still waiting.

“These are difficult situations because this involves legal advice, significant legal liability, which we cannot just ignore,” said Breed. “This is one of the biggest holdups to why we have not moved forward.”

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The shelter site was hastily created, at Pier 94, using state-financed trailers that were furnished to the city during the pandemic. It has faced criticism before – because the location is surrounded by several concrete making facilities. Those facilities generate microscopic dust that air quality officials say is tied to everything from asthma to lung cancer. In fact, air quality officials visited the shelter last year – dispensing air filters for residents and promising to crack down on the dust.

“It’s not the ideal situation…. but where’s the alternative?” Gwendolyn Westbrook, CEO of the shelter operator United Council of Human Services said in April of last year.

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Now, city documents indicate that a staff member at the site was demanding under-the-table payments. However, the issue didn’t come to the city’s attention until this year, when a dismissed staffer alerted authorities.

The ensuing investigation found spaces were “illegally sold to some residents” – prompting the City Attorney and Controller’s office to refer the matter to the FBI and San Francisco prosecutors for possible criminal charges.

In an interview last year, Westbrook touted the shelter as a way out of homelessness. “They’ve been looking for jobs, they’ve been doing what they need to do to change their lifestyle around,” she said.

Westbrook would not talk about the recent allegations. However, in its response to a recent city audit, the shelter dismissed the accusations as “negative claims and lies” spread by a disgruntled ex-worker who was dismissed for breaking shelter rules.

The documents – which include a city letter demanding repayment by the shelter — confirm that it was that dismissed worker who notified the city a month after losing his job. That ex-worker blamed another staff member, still working on the site. A shelter resident also reportedly identified that same current staff member as the person who took her payment.

The documents show that shelter officials ultimately acknowledged to city officials that five residents had to pay for spots. The city’s letter referring the case to prosecutors also alleges that even after becoming aware of the allegations, the shelter did not initially report it.

He and two other doctors, including Dr. Rachel Ruiz, wrote a letter to hospital leaders on Dec. 8 requesting “an urgent meeting” to talk about the state of the facility’s pediatric gastroenterology department.

In the letter, obtained by the Investigative Unit, the physicians detailed what they describe as a dire situation.

According to the letter, their department had 135 routine new referrals waiting for an appointment that, once made, would still be three months out.

Santa Clara County Dec 8, 2022

Valley Medical Center Doctors Report Dangerously Long Patient Wait Times

Investigative Unit Dec 8, 2022

South Bay Patients Report Long Appointment Wait Times

In the letter, the doctors estimate, “It takes three to four months for a child in that queue to make it to the front of the line to then be able to make an appointment with us. Therefore, our wait times for routine new patients is about six to seven months.”

Dr. Ruiz feels the system is inequitable and unjust.

“What if that family doesn’t speak English? That adds a whole other barrier,” she said. “When you’re thinking about a problem that you’re dealing with, whether it’s a stomach ache, whether it’s horrible diarrhea every day where you’re afraid to even go to school…it creates a stress for the entire family.”

Dr. Ruiz is one of the doctors the Investigative Unit spoke to for our prior report on physician burnout and long patient wait times for specialty care across more than 20 Valley Medical Center departments. Over the course of our reporting, the county reached a deal with physicians to increase their pay, add staff and allow primary care doctors to see one fewer patient per four-hour period. Dr. Ruiz and Dr. Fink say the deal does not help their department because they are a specialty.

“This population here has less capacity to advocate for themselves,” Dr. Fink said. “What I find disappointing is that they’re treated differently when the reason to treat somebody with compassion and respect is not because they might sue you, but because it’s the right thing to do.”

The doctors say there is a separate queue for urgent cases, but to get on that list, a pediatrician or the family needs to advocate for the child. In some cases, they say, families aren’t able to advocate enough for the child or they might miss a hospital notification. Ultimately, Dr. Frink and Dr. Ruiz believe the county needs to increase patient access by hiring another fulltime pediatric gastroenterologist – something they’ve been requesting for more than a year, they say.

On Monday, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center’s CEO Paul Lorenz declined an interview with the Investigative Unit and did not answer specific questions our team sent to him. Instead, he sent a statement to NBC Bay Area saying, ““Like many health care systems, our hospitals and clinics are impacted by a high number of patients seeking care following the COVID-19 pandemic and the rising incidence of influenza and RSV.”

The statement went on to say, in part, “We are working with the Pediatric GI Division to ensure that all clinic appointment slots are appropriately filled and optimized each day, to assess any additional provider staffing needs, and to further improve the system and patient access.”

“We think about if that was my child, if that was my niece or my nephew or my neighbor, would it be acceptable? And the answer is always no,” said Dr. Ruiz. “Something needs to change.”

Update: On Dec. 16, the County of Santa Clara sent the Investigative Unit a statement saying:

“Currently, based on information from the pediatric GI division, appointments for urgent visits are scheduled according to urgency and can be accommodated as soon as within 1-2 weeks. Routine appointments typically take about three months given the increase in patient volume following the COVID-19 pandemic. We have not been provided with any information to support the allegations that new/routine appointments take 6-7 months…If there are specific outlier situations, we would be happy to review them with the division.”

Candice Nguyen was the investigative reporter on this story. If you’d like to reach her about this report or another story idea, email candice.nguyen@nbcuni.com.

Those are some of the median patient wait times to see a specialist physician at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, which is a county hospital that serves our community’s underinsured and uninsured.

“I had a patient who was waiting months to be seen,” said Dr. Rachel Ruiz who is a pediatric gastroenterologist, a specialist, at the hospital.

““Reading this child’s chart, I had a strong suspicion that he had either a gastric or duodenal ulcer. These ulcers can be ticking timebombs,” Dr. Ruiz recalled. She was not able to see the child right away because after the primary doctor referred the child to her, Dr. Ruiz’s first available appointment was months away when it should have been within a couple weeks, according to multiple doctors the Investigative Unit spoke to. A possible language barrier also prevented the family from letting medical staff know their son was getting worse. By the time Dr. Ruiz saw the boy, she was concerned too much time had passed.

“He had been doubled over in pain for weeks. He had lost a bunch of weight. It’s unconscionable,” Dr. Ruiz said.

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Dr. Ruiz isn’t the only Santa Clara County-employed doctor speaking out about alarmingly long patient wait times. Dr. Eon Rios with the hospital’s dermatology division said he’s also seen the wait times impact patient care.

“If they’re severe enough, [patients] can go to the Emergency Department and get admitted. But there’s just no space because we don’t have enough to cover both inpatient and outpatient,” he said.

Dr. Ruiz and Dr. Rios told the Investigative Unit high patient counts are also leading to physician burnout. The two physicians are part of a group of Santa Clara Valley Medical Center doctors who recently held a demonstration threatening to walk off the job.

NBC Bay Area brought these concerns to the county’s top executive Jeff Smith who believes the county can do better but, overall, is doing a good job.

“If you look at our performance numbers that are standardized across the nation, we do a good job of providing good quality care,” Dr. Smith said.

Dr. Smith said the county is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to recruit more doctors. But when it comes to reducing patient counts for doctors on staff currently, he said that is not a viable option.

“We’ve been asking them to see two and half patients an hour in primary care clinics…[the doctors] want less than two,” Dr. Jeff said. “We understand the doctors are feeling the stress of the work, but we can’t sacrifice access for our patients in order to deal with the stress. We have to use other options.”

Shortly after the Investigative Unit’s interview with Dr. Smith, the county reached a tentative agreement with the doctor’s union, Valley Physicians Group, which would:

• Increase doctor pay.
• Add hospital and nursing staff to assist physicians.
• And allow doctors to see one fewer patient per four-hour period.

With increased recruitment and this new agreement, Dr. Ruiz and Dr. Rios said they are cautiously optimistic. Some of the changes only last two years under the current agreement. They feel this battle has been about patients, but also about doctors advocating for themselves especially after a recent union survey showed 68% of Santa Clara County-employee doctors recently considered leaving within the next three years.

“If we don’t stand up now, then when?” said Dr. Ruiz.

It is currently unclear whether patient wait times will improve as a direct result of the new agreement, which the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors approved in a second reading on Dec. 6. Since the Investigative Unit’s interview with County Executive Jeff Smith, he announced his is retiring from his position next year after 13 years. In a statement, he said he was ready to spend more time with family.

Manuel Rodriguez, 29, was set for arraignment Thursday in connection with the death of 61-year-old Jeffrey Diaz, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office.

Diaz was found dead in his apartment on April 26 of this year by county sheriff’s deputies, and investigators located text messages in his phone from about 10 days earlier that appeared to show a fentanyl deal, and data showed that he stopped using his cellphone that day, prosecutors said.

Court documents indicate the sheriff’s special enforcement division found text messages and security footage showing a fentanyl deal.

“We treat every overdose death as a homicide investigation and until evidence proves otherwise,” said Santa Clara Sheriff’s Captain Brendan Omori. 

“The suspect is charged with murder, selling fentanyl, possessing fentanyl for sale, selling methamphetamine and possessing methamphetamine for sale. And because of those charges, he’s looking at a sentence of life in prison. I should add that this is the third case that we’ve charged in our county of murder for someone selling fentanyl to another person,” said District Attorney Jeff Rosen.

Investigators said they also observed Rodriguez dealing fentanyl to other potential victims and telling them to be careful because the drug was potentially deadly.

Both the Santa Clara County DA and sheriff’s office say in order to make an arrest it is important to have evidence that shows the drug dealer had knowledge of the potency or death risk of the drug they are selling.

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“Lou Rodriguez knew how dangerous and lethal fentanyl was and sold it anyway, showing reckless disregard for human life, which is why we’ve charged him with murder,” said Rosen. 

According to Santa Clara County’s medical examiner, fentanyl deaths tripled there from 2019 to 2020, and then spiked again in 2021. As of October 2022, there have been 103 fentanyl deaths in Santa Clara county.

“I think a way to think about people that die from fat fentanyl is not that they’re drug addicts or that they overdosed, but really that they were poisoned,” said Rosen. “And when we think about poisoning, we understand that is something that requires a murder charge.”

NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit previously examined the challenges some law enforcement agencies have had holding drug dealers accountable for overdose deaths.  You can check that out here.

About 80 endangered whales are killed off the West Coast each year by a phenomenon known as ‘ship strikes,’ which is when vessels unintentionally, and sometimes unknowingly, hit and kill whales.

The area off the San Francisco coast is home to one of the largest feeding habitats for whales in the world, but it’s also the entrance and exit to one of America’s busiest shipping ports. Each year, 2.4 million cargo containers come through the Port of Oakland, the tenth busiest port in America.

While ship strikes are especially devastating to endangered and threatened species, the exact magnitude of the problem remains difficult to determine.

Shipping companies are required by federal law to document each time a vessel hits a whale, but ship strikes can often go unnoticed by vessels. Scientists believe most dead whales sink to the bottom of the ocean, and so while some whales wash up dead with physical signs of a ship strike, those only represent a fraction of the total death toll, which researchers say could be 10 to 20 times higher.

The blue whale, which can grow up to 110 feet long, is the largest animal known to have ever lived on Earth, however, fast-moving ships are proving to be an even bigger adversary, one that is now pushing some species toward the brink of extinction.

“We’re talking about skyscraper-sized ships that belong to billion-dollar companies,” said Douglas McCauley, who heads the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory. “Some shipping companies are simply just totally disregarding this risk for running over endangered whales.”

In hopes of reducing ship strikes, the federal government instituted a voluntary speed limit of 10 knots, during peak whale months, for large ships entering and leaving the Bay. While the annual program is nearly a decade old, the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit has learned ships are still speeding – sometimes at more than twice the limit.

Since the start of this year’s slow down – which runs from May 1 to Dec. 15 – more than 670 large ships have traveled through the Bay, breaking the speed limit 40 percent of the time.

“We’re not reaching the goals that we wanted,” said Maria Brown, a superintendent with NOAA, the agency in charge of the voluntary slow-down program. “We’re trying to figure out what are the best strategies that we should be implementing.”

The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit has spoken with Brown several times over the years to speak about the lack of compliance within the shipping industry.

“It just seems that if you spend years asking companies to voluntarily do something and they choose not to do it, it might be time to force them,” said Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban during an interview with Brown.

“And we’re asking the experts, what does that look like,” Brown replied.

NOAA could choose to make the speed limit mandatory, punishable by hefty fines, but its decision is not expected until sometime in 2023, as it gains input from the public and the shipping industry, which has long argued that slowing down could hurt its bottom line.

Large ships are required to constantly transmit their location and speed when at sea for safety reasons.

The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit obtained and analyzed more than 25,000 of those ship traffic records and of the 10 companies traveling in and around the Bay most often, Matson Navigation, a cargo shipping company, has the worst track record, surpassing the voluntary speed limit more than 80 percent of the time so far this year.

While the recommended speed limit is 10 knots, Matson Navigation’s ships average 14 knots as it transports cars, food, household goods, and more.

“We instruct all of our vessels to abide by these voluntary programs to the greatest extent possible, given our operational requirements, and we do slow significantly through these areas,” a company spokesperson wrote in a statement.

The Investigative Unit also learned cruise lines are frequent offenders, too. While their average speed is less than one or two knots above the voluntary limit, Celebrity still cruises past that recommend speed about 64 percent of the time.  Carnival and Princess cruise lines travel above the recommended limit about 50 percent of the time.

Princess said it has “clear guidelines” for when whales are spotted nearby, which “include altering course and reducing speed as required.” The company, however, said “on occasion there are circumstances beyond our control for situations such as medical emergency or adverse weather that require us to accelerate…”

Neither Carnival nor Celebrity responded to requests for comment.

“I fear that whale populations eventually could go extinct,” said Kathi George, who heads the dispatch team at the Marine Mammal Center, which responds to wildlife strandings, including whales hit by ships. “You will see tissue that is all macerated together – broken bones in different parts of their bodies.”

Fran, a 49-foot humpback, lovingly known as California’s most-sighted whale, recently washed up dead in the Bay, a victim of a ship strike.

“Fran’s death tells me that more needs to be done,” George said. “The voluntary slowdown that we have off of our coast is not enough to save all the whales.”

While the federal government’s voluntary speed limit has been in place since 2015, annual compliance among the shipping industry has plateaued in recent years, remaining around 60 percent.

“It would be like speeding through your neighborhood and caring nothing about either the speed limit or about the safety of kids and people in your neighborhood,” McCauley said. “This is what’s happening, unfortunately, right here at sea.”

In an effort to reduce whale deaths, the Marine Mammal Center partnered with the Benioff Ocean Sciences Laboratory to create ‘Whale Safe,’ a sort of whale forecast for vessels, so shipping companies can better educate themselves on when to adjust speeds or routes in hopes of avoiding whales.

The online tool incorporates real-time whale sightings, satellite data that tracks likely food sources, and an underwater detection system that is attached to a buoy about 25 miles off the San Francisco coast. The technology, placed about 300 feet below the ocean’s surface, is constantly listening for the sultry sound of whales.

“This gives us visibility and lets us kind of peek under the top layer of the ocean and see what’s out there,” George said. “We have an opportunity to take some action and not accept the status quo for the status quo and really make a difference.”

Since Whale Safe set up its sound detection system in August, it has been able to identify endangered whales in the area more than 300 times.  Some scientists, however, remain skeptical on just how useful the program will be since it cannot pinpoint exact locations of whales.

Still, MSC – a global container shipping company – says it is already taking steps to incorporate the technology right onto its vessels.

“This live information will make it easier for the captains to be made aware, versus making the last-minute detours,” said Stanley Kwiaton, who manages MSC marine operations on the west coast. “You sometimes have to do the right thing and not always look to be the quickest, fastest.  We have to all protect this planet.”

Certain whales off the California coast, like the blue whale, are so vulnerable that as little as four deaths a year could sink the population.

“It’s the ecosystem of our ocean,” George said. “We shouldn’t be out there accidentally or needlessly killing something because we want to get something faster or quicker.” 

Additional Contributors
Design and development: Nelson Hsu and Amy O’Kruk/NBC

Watch Our Entire Series:

• Part 1: Hundreds of Endangered Whales Likely Killed off CA Coast Over Past Decade
• Part 2: ‘Ship Strikes’ Killing Whales Despite Govt. Program to Slow Down Vessels
• Part 3: Trump Administration Facing Legal Action Over ‘Ship Strikes’ Killing Endangered Whales
• Part 4: Environmentalists Wage Legal Battle to Curb Whale Deaths Off California Coast
• Part 5: Cruises, Cargo Ships Break Voluntary Speed Limit Aimed at Protecting Whales

Last year, the Navy reported finding 23 Strontium-90 hotspots along a total of nine sewer lines serving Parcel G, a 40-acre site that was once home to a secret nuclear research lab.

The Navy’s own history of the site indicates Strontium-90 as a potential Parcel G contaminant. The isotope is known to replace Calcium in bones and has been tied to cancer.

Possible sources cited in the Navy history include work at the top secret lab on the site, which involved injecting animals with radioactive isotopes.

The Navy suggests other sources as well, including liquid radioactive waste being poured down sinks or left when crews painted deck markers with Strontium-90 laced, glow-in-the dark paint.

Strontium-90 may have also been left from when crews sandblasted ships returning from Operation Crossroads, post-World War II atomic bomb testing in the Pacific.

Still, after acknowledging elevated levels came back on ten percent of the samples tested by its new testing contractor, the Navy last year said it intended to reevaluate its own findings. Officials noted that the Navy’s cleanup testing protocol allowed it to make “certain adjustments” to result in more precise and better quality data.

But an EPA official involved in overseeing the cleanup of the contaminated site, warned the Navy against dismissing the data already analyzed at that time. He warned in an email last October to top Navy officials — obtained by NBC Bay Area — that the data was accurate and suggesting otherwise without proof “reads as if the Navy is suppressing data results it doesn’t like in regards to Strontium-90 data.”

In a briefing in August of this year to a community advisory panel on the project, cleanup project manager Liz Roddy rolled out results of the Navy’s promised review of the earlier findings that had shown cases where Strontium-90 had exceeded allowable levels.
She called the data “skewed,” and added: “Everybody who’s reviewed this data can agree that that’s not a reliable result, that there’s too much noise for us to determine if that’s a true exceedance.”

During the meeting, she presented a new chart with 1,000 data points, all falling within allowable levels for Strontium-90.
Critics were quick to question dozens of datapoints on the chart, however, that reflect Strontium-90 levels below zero.

“It’s completely erroneous,” said Dr. James Dahlgren, a medical doctor who specializes in environmental toxicology. “It is false, it is offensive to me scientifically.”

“To have a negative figure on their data for Strontium- 90, you can’t have it, period — it’s impossible,” said Ray Tompkins, a retired chemistry teacher and environmental activist who served on an earlier Hunters Point shipyard cleanup advisory panel. “And any data that says that,” he added, “you must reject it if you have any integrity.”

Both Tompkins and Dahlgren said the subzero data should trigger an independent review.

While the Navy wouldn’t answer questions or specifically respond to what critics say about sub-zero findings, officials have said there’s no risk to public health from what has been detected to date.

The EPA said in a statement that any final determination of Strontium-90 levels on Parcel G will be based on “fully validated test results.”

For activists like Tompkins, there’s no time to waste.

“That’s the crime,” Tompkins said, “the damage that is being done and will be done in the future unless appropriate measurements are taken now.”

The panel’s action ended, for now, what had been a remote threat of public takeover of the utility had PG&E not satisfied the terms of what regulators called “enhanced oversight and enforcement” imposed in April of last year.

The action came after regulators expressed concerns about PG&E’s failure to clear trees from lines that it had ranked at the highest risk for wildfires. Under the terms, the company had to make 90-day updates about progress in prioritizing vegetation management efforts.

 In urging probation be lifted, CPUC executive director Rachel Peterson told the panel PG&E has satisfied regulators. “Our enhanced oversight led to PG&E correcting this specific safety failure,” she said. “PG&E has now demonstrated to staff satisfaction that in 2021 and 2022, it has been doing the vast majority of its EVM (enhanced vegetation management) work in the areas of its system, posing the greatest risk of igniting a catastrophic wildfire.”

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She noted the utility met or exceeded its vegetation clearance targets for the last two years.

PG&E has said the removal from probation would mark “an important milestone” to prove it has evolved its efforts to account for areas at greatest risk of sparking more fires.

“We remain focused on wildfire safety to address the climate risk that we’re facing now and the climate challenges we will face in the future. We are committed to doing our work the right way for our customers and communities,” the utility said in a statement issued when regulators first urged ending its probation.

Critics had sought more oversight, not less, in light of last year’s Dixie Fire, which Cal Fire blamed on tree contact with a PG&E line.

But CPUC commissioners agreed the matter before the panel was only whether the utility satisfied the terms imposed by the enhanced oversight. Oversight they credited for improving safety.

“It did work, it did address an important problem and we should not be bashful about doing it again,” said Commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen. “It’s a potent tool, that’s why we put it in place. Because PG&E’s operational practices remain a serious concern to us.”