This 2005 multimedia project took me across the United States and into Mexico and Central America. We showed how a U.S. immigration policy of deporting “criminal aliens” backfired with members of the Mara Salvatrucha, spreading what was once a Los Angeles gang across six countries and 33 states. We captured original video footage inside a prison in El Salvador and interviewed gang members, law enforcement officials, victims and intervention workers for this eight-month-long project. Here’s the link to the entire series.

(Photo Credit: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

This investigation took me into the underworld of human smuggling, organized crime and narco-trafficking in the badlands east of Tijuana. The area was controlled by the ruthless Arellano-Felix drug cartel. My colleagues and I investigated the Mexican smuggling village of Jacume and the corrupt law enforcement officials who allowed the crime to flourish. Known as a “black hole” of crime and corruption, the village sits high on a ridge overlooking the U.S. border and eastern San Diego County. We obtained confidential law enforcement documents and interviewed residents, smugglers and U.S. and Mexican authorities for a look at the inner-workings of an operation largely beyond the control of law enforcement. Here’s a link the article and here’s a link to a great Luis Sinco photo gallery of images shot during our investigation.

(Photo Credit: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

To this day, questions still swirl around the death of L.A. Times columnist and KMEX news director Ruben Salazar, who was killed by a Sheriff’s deputy on Aug. 29, 1970. I produced this Ruben Salazar video, pictured above, in 2008 after the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a stamp honoring the reporter’s legacy. My Column One article was written in 1995 for  the L.A. Times on the 25th anniversary of the newsman’s slaying. I relied on a variety of sources, including friends and colleagues of Salazar, as well as documents from the FBI and LAPD, to reconstruct the final weeks before Salazar was killed by a sheriff’s deputy while covering an anti-Vietnam War rally that exploded into violence. I also wrote a follow-up article in 1999, after waiting nearly six years for the FBI’s Salazar file.

Los Angeles Times
Saturday August 26, 1995
COLUMN ONE
Journalist’s Death Still Clouded by Questions
Friends say Ruben Salazar, whose stories often criticized police treatment of Mexican Americans, believed he was in danger. His 1970 slaying left a lasting wound.
Home Edition, Main News, Page A-1
Metro Desk
91 inches; 3215 words
Type of Material: Non Dup; Mainbar
By ROBERT J. LOPEZ, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Shaken and nervous while picking at a plate of soft tacos, Ruben Salazar revealed his darkest fears. A leading advocate for the Mexican American community, the award-winning Times columnist and KMEX-TV news director suspected that he was being shadowed by police.

The newsman’s forceful columns and television coverage had sharply criticized police actions in Los Angeles’ Mexican American neighborhoods. Salazar had called the lunch meeting at an Olvera Street restaurant to put it “on the record” that he believed police might do something to discredit his reporting.

Two days later, on the eve of covering a major anti-Vietnam War rally, Salazar cleared his normally messy desk at KMEX and took his treasured hate mail off the wall. His former boss, Danny Villanueva, clearly remembers the response when he told Salazar he would see him later:

“Yeah, if I make it back,” Salazar said.

The next day he was dead. On Aug. 29, 1970, while covering the National Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, the 42-year-old Salazar was killed instantly by a sheriff’s tear gas projectile while he sat in an East Los Angeles bar.

Was it a coincidence that he had seemingly foreshadowed his death just days before? The three friends who lunched with him that day think not.

“He had a feeling they were going to kill him,” said Philip Montez, western regional director for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who was with Salazar at the restaurant.

All available evidence shows that Salazar’s slaying was nothing more than a tragic accident. The Sheriff’s Department said that its deputy did nothing wrong and was operating under riot conditions when he fired the wall-piercing missile through the curtained doorway of the Silver Dollar cafe.

The most prominent Mexican American journalist of his time, Salazar became even larger in death than in life. Parks, schools and scholarships were named in his honor. He instantly became a martyr for the Chicano civil rights movement. And he became a lasting inspiration for a generation of Latino journalists who followed in his wake.

But the killing left an open wound that has yet to heal a quarter of a century later. Even now, as activists prepare for a march today commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Chicano moratorium, the questions surrounding Salazar’s death still remain.

“It seemed too precise to be an accidental thing,” said Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente), who led a delegation that stormed out in protest from a coroner’s inquiry into the newsman’s killing. “It is still a major question mark in my mind today.”

The reasons for those doubts and suspicions have become clear with the passage of time:

* The coroner’s inquest failed to resolve conflicting accounts of the slaying and is widely believed by Mexican American activists to have focused more on the actions of the rioters than on the circumstances of Salazar’s slaying. Four of the seven jurors in the quasi-judicial proceeding ruled that the newsman “died at the hands of another,” a verdict that confused many and satisfied few.

* The district attorney decided not to file any charges against the deputy who fired the fatal projectile. The attorney for the Salazar family and many in the Mexican American community believe that manslaughter charges were warranted.

* Doubts exist about the thoroughness of a federal investigation into the slaying. Those close to Salazar say they were never aware that federal officials pursued a full-fledged investigation. The U.S. Justice Department insists that it conducted an exhaustive probe of the killing but found no grounds for criminal charges.

“Serious questions were never answered,” said Mario T. Garcia, a UC Santa Barbara history professor who has authored a newly published book on Salazar. “But whether or not he was killed on purpose, it was a tragic loss of a major voice for the Mexican American community.”

Hard-Hitting Reporter

When he stepped into The Times newsroom in 1959, Salazar was known as a hard-hitting, streetwise reporter, a reputation earned during his days at the El Paso Herald-Post.

At The Times, Salazar reported on a variety of issues and covered a Mexican American community that had largely been ignored by the media. In an award-winning 1963 series, he examined problems that still plague Latinos today: substandard education, high dropout rates and a lack of political power.

In 1965, Salazar became a Times correspondent in the Dominican Republic, then went to Vietnam and Mexico. In 1969, he returned to Los Angeles during a tumultuous period to report on Mexican American issues.

The Eastside had become a hotbed of protest and discontent in the four years that Salazar had been gone. Activists had begun calling themselves Chicanos instead of Mexican Americans . Thousands of students had staged walkouts at area high schools, demanding more Chicano teachers and improved facilities. Protesters, meanwhile, were decrying the disproportionate number of Chicanos dying in Vietnam.

Salazar covered many of those events, but he apparently felt an urge to do more. In January, 1970, he left The Times to become news director for the Spanish-language television station KMEX.

“Ruben was restless,” recalled former KMEX general manager Villanueva, now a Los Angeles businessman. “He wanted to do more to reach out to the city’s Spanish-speaking community.”

Bill Thomas, then Times city editor, asked Salazar to write a weekly column on Chicano affairs. In the little more than six months he spent as a columnist, Salazar changed from a journalist reporting the news to a commentator advocating on behalf of Mexican Americans. His columns explained the frustrations, triumphs and shortcomings of the Chicano community.

“His best work as a journalist, in my opinion, is that he described us for others,” said Felix Gutierrez, a Lincoln Heights native who is now vice president of the Freedom Forum media foundation. “[But] in describing us for others, he defined us for ourselves.”

At KMEX, according to his colleagues there, Salazar did some of his most hard-hitting reporting on law enforcement.
In July, 1970, Salazar assigned KMEX crews to aggressively cover the killing of two Mexican nationals by Los Angeles Police Department officers. Concerned about the coverage, police visited Salazar at the station.

“They warned me about the ‘impact’ the interviews would have on the department’s image,” Salazar wrote in a July 24, 1970, Times column. “Besides, they said, this kind of information could be dangerous in the minds of barrio people.”

About the same time, Salazar and KMEX reporters had begun a major investigation into widespread allegations that police and sheriff’s deputies had beaten residents and planted evidence when making arrests, according to William Restrepo, who was a KMEX reporter working on the story.

“We had [information] that we thought was going to be very explosive,” Restrepo, now a news director at a Miami radio station, said in an interview. Villanueva also said he knew that Salazar was gathering information on the police but added that he was not aware of the specifics.

While working on the story, Restrepo said, they were tipped off by a source that LAPD officers had found out about the project. “We kind of figured we were in hot water,” Restrepo said. He explained that he and Salazar feared that they might be followed or that police might do something to discredit them, such as plant drugs in their cars.

Ed Davis, the LAPD chief at the time, denied that his officers on the Eastside were engaged in brutality or planted evidence. He also said he was not aware of police following Salazar, though he acknowledged that it could have been done without permission by “some low-level officer.”

“I’m positive he wasn’t [being officially followed] because no one ever came to me in an intelligence briefing saying Salazar is up to this or the other thing,” Davis said in an interview last week.

The LAPD did have a file on Salazar that contained copies of some of his articles and transcripts of two KMEX broadcasts, police records show. The file also contains a half-page biography on the journalist that quotes a “reliable confidential informant (a Times employee) [who] states Salazar, in his opinion, is a slanted, left-wing-oriented reporter.”

Then-Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess declined through a spokesman at the Sheriff’s Relief Assn. to be interviewed. But Sheriff Sherman Block, who commanded the detective division at the time, said relations with East Los Angeles residents were good and that he was not aware of any surveillance against Salazar.

“I think I would have been familiar with something like that,” Block said, adding that he had never heard of Salazar until after he was killed.

In the weeks leading up to the Chicano Moratorium, according to his friends and family, Salazar not only believed that he was being followed, but he seemed to act as if he expected something to happen to him.

“Ruben had changed in those last few weeks,” Sally Salazar, who died two years ago, wrote of her husband in a column on the 10th anniversary of his death. “Whenever he left the house, he made a special point of telling me exactly where he was going to be–something he had never done before.”

About 10 days before the march, Salazar called the Los Angeles office of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “He said he just wanted it on the record that the police were after him, tailing him,” said then-commission staffer Charlie Ericksen, now a Washington journalist.

Ericksen set up a lunch meeting the following Wednesday at La Luz Del Dia restaurant on Olvera Street. Joining Salazar that afternoon on Aug. 26, 1970, were commission official Montez, Ericksen and a Catholic priest, Henry J. Casso.

“I realized that Ruben was scared,” recalled Montez. “I had never seen him as upset as he was.”

According to the men at the meeting, Salazar said the police were claiming that his reporting was inflaming emotions in the Mexican American community. “He also thoroughly mentioned how he was constantly looking over his shoulder,” said Casso, who has since left the priesthood and now lives in Albuquerque, N.M.

Ericksen said he remembers that they joked that police would try to shoot the newsman.

“What’s the worst they can do? Plant some dope in your car,” Montez said he told Salazar as they left the restaurant. “Just watch where you go.”

Thomas said he remembers Salazar mentioning something about being followed by police but added that the columnist did not appear too concerned. “I do remember some kind of talk about that, but it was not forcibly put,” said Thomas, who was The Times’ editor from 1971 to 1989.

It was not unusual, Thomas noted, for reporters on the police beat to have such concerns. “Everyone who wrote about cops and got critical in those days was looking over his shoulder,” he said.

On the eve of the Chicano Moratorium, Villanueva said, Salazar was acting “unusual.”

He cleaned up his messy desk. Pinned on the wall were hate letters, which Villanueva said Salazar displayed as his “badge that he was getting to people.” He took them down.

Salazar also kept asking if Laguna Park, where the rally would be held after the march, was in the city or in county territory. “He seemed concerned,” Villanueva said, “about whose jurisdiction it was: the police or the sheriff’s.”

Riots, Tear Gas, Death

On Aug. 29, 1970, Salazar, Restrepo and cameraman Octavio Gomez met at 7 a.m. at the East Los Angeles sheriff’s station next to Belvedere Park.

An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people from across the nation had arrived for the high point of the Chicano civil rights movement that had been building for more than two years. The men, women and children marched down Whittier Boulevard and flooded the grassy area at Laguna Park (later renamed Ruben Salazar Park).

As the multitudes sprawled on the grass that hot, smoggy day, the rally began. While folk dancers performed on a stage, deputies were hit by rocks and bottles when they responded to reports of looting at a nearby liquor store.
Sheriff’s commanders ordered helmeted, baton-wielding officers to clear the park–which rally leaders later charged was an overreaction.

Tear gas canisters, their white smoke trailing in the air, were fired into the crowd. Many fled in panic. Some stayed and battled deputies. Others ran down Whittier Boulevard, smashing store windows and setting fires in the street.

It was the biggest, bloodiest riot in Los Angeles since Watts five years earlier. More than $1 million in property was destroyed, dozens of people were injured and arrested. Three people would ultimately die.

Salazar and his crew furiously covered the action, working their way east along Whittier Boulevard over a period of several hours. “When we were walking down Whittier Boulevard, Ruben said we were being followed,” recalled former KMEX reporter Restrepo. “I turned around and I saw a lot of deputies.”

With the officers trailing them on foot, Restrepo said, he and Salazar went into the Silver Dollar Cafe to use the bathroom. Afterward, they decided to grab a quick beer.

What happened next has been the subject of dispute for a quarter of a century. The following scenario is based on interviews and testimony given at the Salazar inquest:

About 5 p.m., according to the Sheriff’s Department, a man in the area told deputies there were two men with guns who had entered the Silver Dollar bar, at 4945 Whitter Blvd. That report turned out to be inaccurate.

Deputies swooped down on the small, one-story building and said they shouted several orders for the occupants to come out. But 12 people who were inside the bar later testified that they never heard any such commands.

Raul Ruiz, then co-editor of a Chicano magazine called La Raza, was sitting across the street from the bar with a colleague and took a series of photographs as deputies surrounded the bar. He, too, said deputies never shouted any orders to leave.

The deputies, weapons in hand, poked through the curtained doorway of the bar, according to Ruiz, now a professor of Chicano studies at Cal State Northridge.

One of Ruiz’s photos shows what he and five other witnesses testified happened next: A shotgun-wielding deputy pointed his weapon at four men–one with his hands in the air–ordering them into the bar as they gathered outside the door moments before the gas was fired. The deputies later said that they could not remember seeing the men and denied forcing anyone into the bar.

But the four men, as well as a fifth person not in the photo, later testified that they were ordered at gunpoint into the bar, only to be gassed after obeying the command.

When the occupants failed to leave the building, according to Deputy Thomas H. Wilson, he fired two projectiles from the sidewalk as he moved rapidly from side to side in front of the curtained doorway. Wilson, who was three to five feet from the doorway when he fired, testified that he could not see people inside the bar because the curtain was closed. And he later said he had never heard of Salazar until after the killing.

The first shot–a 10-inch torpedo-shaped missile designed to pierce plywood–struck Salazar in the left temple as he and Restrepo sat at the bar.

“We didn’t even have a chance to start the beer when the first gas canister came in,” Restrepo said in an interview.
Minutes after Wilson’s two shots, a patrol car with four deputies drove up. One of the deputies, who later testified he was unaware that gas had already been used, got out of the car, got on one knee and fired two additional tear gas rounds into the building.

The choking smoke quickly filled the tiny bar, Restrepo said, as he and others crawled on their hands and knees out the back door.

Outside, Restrepo said, he saw his shirt splattered with blood, which he figured was Salazar’s.

“I told [deputies] I wanted to go back to the bar because my boss was still there, but they didn’t let me go back,” he recalled. “They took me to the corner about a block away and left me there.”

For about two hours, Salazar’s body lay in the dark, smoke-filled bar. Deputies later said they did not go inside because they did not have gas masks. Finally, about 7 p.m., his body was removed.
Investigation Demanded

Within days of the killing, accusations were swirling that Salazar had been murdered.
KMEX-TV, citing conflicting accounts of the slaying, asked the FBI to investigate. Then-Rep. Edward Roybal (D-Los Angeles) and 20 of his colleagues wrote a letter to the Justice Department calling for an “impartial” probe to “reduce the increasing suspicions and atmosphere of
distrust surrounding [Salazar's] death.”
*
It was in that environment that the coroner’s office decided to conduct its inquest. Held in a hearing room in the Downtown Hall of Records, the 16-day event became a media spectacle, with all seven Los Angeles television stations rotating unprecedented live color coverage.

An inquest is intended to disclose facts to help attorneys for official agencies and the family of the deceased determine further action. In many ways, the rules governing the proceeding resulted in the unfulfilled expectations that still haunt critics of the Salazar inquest.

An inquest verdict expresses no blame and is not binding on any other legal action. Unlike a court trial, normal rules of evidence do not apply, and the hearing officer controlling the inquest has wide latitude in allowing hearsay, opinion and non-responsive answers.

Much of the testimony was criticized as irrelevant by Mexican American activists, who walked out of the inquest on several occasions. The testimony, they charged, was intended to portray Latinos as people needing to be policed or bent on insurrection.

The seven-member panel was shown a graphic film featuring sights and sounds of rocks and bottles hurled at deputies at Laguna Park.
On another occasion, when Ruiz was questioned about his photos, hearing officer Norman Pittluck inquired about a placard carried by a marcher that said “Viva Che,” referring to Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara.

“Is he Mr. [Fidel] Castro’s man?” Pittluck asked.

The inquest did uncover that Wilson shot the fatal projectile. The deputy testified that he fired quickly toward the ceiling of the bar to flush out armed men who he thought were inside. The deputy also said he did not know whether he had the fatal missile loaded in his gun or a less-lethal cardboard canister.

“I [just] wanted to get something inside,” Wilson said, “and I wanted to get it inside quick.”

It was never determined whether Wilson was following department procedure when he shot the high-velocity Federal Flite-Rite projectile. It bore the manufacturer’s warning: “For driving out barricaded persons. Not to be used against crowds.”

The Sheriff’s Department said its training manual for tear gas operations was “classified” and refused to submit it as evidence. Pittluck twice refused to subpoena it.

The Times recently requested the manual, but a department spokesman said it was disposed of years ago because use of the Flite-Rite was discontinued shortly after Salazar’s death.

After hearing 61 witnesses offer confusing, sometimes conflicting testimony, four of the seven jurors ruled that Salazar “died at the hands of another,” while the other three concluded that his killing was an accident. No one was certain what the majority verdict meant because it was not defined by the state law governing inquests.

The next week, then-Dist. Atty. Evelle J. Younger announced that no criminal charges would be filed against Wilson. He said that only one charge was ever considered–involuntary manslaughter. But if there was negligence, Younger said, it was not “aggravated, culpable, gross or reckless,” which would have been necessary to prove manslaughter.

Younger, who was running for state attorney general, was accused at the time by Chicano activists of not filing charges because he did not want to alienate the law enforcement community and its supporters. Younger, who died in 1989, denied the accusations.

After Younger’s decision, Pitchess said that “there was absolutely no misconduct on the part of the deputies involved or the procedures they followed.”

With that, the county closed its case.

But attorney Douglas Dalton, who represented Salazar’s widow and three children, filed a lawsuit against the county and won a $700,000 settlement for the family. “This should never have happened,” said then-Supervisor Ernest E. Debs. “A deputy sheriff used a gun against all regulations of the department and fired blindly through a door.”

Dalton said in a recent interview that he thought manslaughter charges against Wilson would have been warranted. Wilson later retired from the force and could not be reached for comment.
*
Despite the persistent calls for a federal probe, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles had no intention of investigating Salazar’s killing, according to an Oct. 20, 1970, memo from the FBI office in Los Angeles to the agency’s headquarters in Washington.

“For the information of the bureau, Robert L. Meyer, [U.S. attorney], Los Angeles, California, orally indicated to agents of this office on 10/19/70 that he has no intention of taking action regarding Salazar’s death,” the memo stated. “However, to offset any possible criticism of his office he is requesting FBI to investigate the cause of the riot.”

The Justice Department said Friday that it did conduct an exhaustive investigation and decided in March, 1971, that there “was insufficient evidence to permit the filing of criminal charges.” A spokesman said he did not know if a public announcement on the closing of the case was made at that time. Montez, the Civil Rights Commission official, and Roybal, the longtime congressman, say they knew of no such federal investigation.
*
Montez, Ericksen and Casso, the three men who lunched with Salazar three days before his death, to this day maintain that his killing was no accident. They said they only realized later how serious the situation was.

“I’m one of those people who still firmly believe that Ruben was a victim of a political assassination,” Ericksen recently told a group of journalists at a forum on Salazar’s legacy.

That view is also shared by Ruiz, the photographer outside the Silver Dollar, and Restrepo, who sat next to Salazar inside the bar.

But Sheriff Block strongly disagrees, saying he recalls testimony at the inquest showing how the bar’s curtain deflected the projectile toward Salazar’s head. “If you have an intent to shoot somebody,” he said last week, “you don’t do it with a tear gas projectile.”

Today, many in the Latino community still feel that a new, more thorough investigation is needed to help write the final chapter on the slain newsman.

But with many of the key people dead, the doubts, suspicions and questions will probably live on.

“When you start putting all those things together, it’s an amazing series of circumstances,” Villanueva says of Salazar’s behavior in those final days and the events leading to his death. “I guess I’ll go to my grave wondering.”

Sometimes visualizations are the best way to convey information. I produced this interactive map as part of a news package about traffic on the Westside of Los Angeles — some of the nation’s worst. The map was a perfect platform for viewers to check traffic data in areas they traveled. I obtained the raw data from the cities of Los Angeles and Santa Monica and then crunched the numbers to find congested intersections and analyze traffic patterns over a period of several years. To tell my tale, I wrote the story around a mother, Cathy Glueck, who lives on the Westside and relishes the challenge of tackling traffic. After interviewing her, I knew she would be great in front of a camera. So here’s a video I also produced, which takes viewers on a ride along with Glueck as she travels with her daughter to soccer practice during the afternoon rush hour.

Los Angeles Times
Monday April 5, 1999
COLUMN ONE
Aid Stalled Yet Again; Hope Dims
* Food and other items finally get from L.A. to Nicaragua, only to sit on a dock. Hurricane victims face desperate conditions.
Home Edition, Main News, Page A-1
Metro Desk
55 inches; 1956 words
Type of Material: Non Dup
By ROBERT J. LOPEZ, TIMES STAFF WRITER

PUERTO CORINTO, Nicaragua — Hundreds of tons of hurricane aid from Los Angeles are stacked up in metal containers under the hot sun at this small port. An hour’s drive away, thousands of victims–barefoot children with swollen bellies, a mother cooking beans in an old paint can–are barely surviving in makeshift refugee camps.

Long delays in getting help to Hurricane Mitch victims are not what Nicole Wool and thousands of other Los Angeles donors had in mind. Five months have passed since the storm tore through Nicaragua, killing 3,000 people and leaving 40,000 families homeless.

“It’s just terrible,” Wool said when told the shipment containing donations she rounded up was sitting at the port. A student at Southwestern University School of Law, Wool rushed to collect bags of food and clothing from her classmates last December. “To have all that stuff sitting there and not have access to it is just inhumane.”

The Nicaraguan consul general in Los Angeles had pledged that all the goods collected would be handed out immediately by the Catholic Church in Nicaragua.

Instead, the cargo has ended up in the hands of a social services operation run by the Nicaraguan president’s daughter, Maria Dolores Aleman. She was in Ecuador last week during her Easter holiday and has said she will decide what to do with the goods after she returns this week.

The stalled shipment shows how good intentions can be undercut by a lack of planning and the politics of aid distribution in a country still divided by civil warfare that raged for about a dozen years.

Shortly after the storm struck Oct. 28, the Nicaraguan consul general in Los Angeles appealed for donations.
The consul and his small staff soon were overwhelmed by mountains of contributions. The 675 tons–from food to medicine to mattresses–became stranded in Los Angeles warehouses for nearly three months because there was no money to pay for shipping.

The snag was reported by The Times in late January. The response from the public helped raise thousands of dollars to transport the badly needed supplies.

Finally, on March 12, the 28 cargo containers of supplies–one of the largest humanitarian shipments to be sent to
Nicaragua–were loaded onto an old freighter at the Port of Los Angeles.

But after landing here on March 19, nearly all of the 40-foot containers remain at the dock. There is no specific plan for distribution.

Meanwhile, relief officials here say that international food donations have tailed off while malnourished victims make do with meager rations and babies go days without milk. “We need the help for our children,” said Miguel Canda, who survives with 11 family members in a plastic tent at a dusty camp an hour from the port.

Canda and other refugees from a massive mudslide that killed more than 1,500 people in a Sandinista-administered area complain that they have been forgotten by the Nicaraguan government. The little food that has arrived, they say, has come largely from international relief organizations and local nonprofit groups.

President Arnoldo Aleman, a widower, has appointed his daughter as first lady. She oversees charities to shelter street children and provide supplies for hospitals in the capital of Managua.

The few Los Angeles items that have been distributed–thousands of dollars worth of new Simmons mattresses–did not reach hurricane survivors, as intended, but went to needy hospitals as part of one of her charity projects.

“I’m appalled,” said Claudia Lanuza of Compton-based Simmons Corp., which made the $30,000 gift. “We wanted to deal specifically with hurricane people.”

The 26-year-old first lady said she would give some of the containers to the Catholic Church and that she and the government are moving as fast as possible to get aid to those who need it, as well as to deserving institutions.

“The destruction was very fast, but the reconstruction is very slow,” she said, adding that she hoped to have the Los Angeles goods distributed in a month.

She said the government is working to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and address victims’ long-term needs.
Some critics, however, accuse the Nicaraguan government of ignoring immediate needs at some refugee camps.

“They decided arbitrarily that the emergency is over, and they have turned their backs on the victims of the hurricane,” said Carlos F. Chamorro, a scion of one of Nicaragua’s most prominent political and journalism families.

He recently surveyed hurricane-hit areas with students from UC Berkeley, where he is on a teaching fellowship.
Clearly, massive amounts of humanitarian aid have found their way to thousands of people across Central America.

But the Los Angeles shipment shows that international gift giving can be an uncertain venture.
The tale of the troubled aid is something Los Angeles donors did not envision.

A Tragic Story Inspires Action

In late October, Hurricane Mitch ravaged Central America with driving rain and winds up to 180 mph.
Back in Los Angeles, Wool and others watched the destruction rage across their TV screens.

Myrna Hernandez and husband Conrad Martin fought back tears as news reports showed battered towns in their native Nicaragua.

Humberto Moya, a supervisor at Simmons, couldn’t help but recall a 1985 earthquake in Mexico City that killed thousands and leveled his brother-in-law’s home.

“I was watching TV and I was thinking, ‘Why don’t we give mattresses to the Hurricane Mitch people?’ ” Moya recalled.

He approached Simmons supervisors, offering to round up a crew to assemble the mattresses on their day off. His bosses liked the idea. About 50 volunteers spent an entire Saturday building 340 top-of-the-line mattresses.

Hernandez and Martin, meanwhile, had turned their Long Beach condominium into a command post. They persuaded the Long Beach Fire Department to put drop-off boxes at its 23 stations. And they rented a small moving van to collect goods left at the stations.

By late December, Consul General Silvio Mendez’s operation had bogged down. Most of the goods that filled three warehouses had yet to be sorted. And Mendez needed about $30,000 for shipping costs.

At the same time, a local relief effort coordinated by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles) shipped hundreds of tons of supplies to Nicaragua and Honduras. But the congresswoman worked only with nonprofit groups, saying she had received reports of corruption and of government aid shipments sitting idle after they arrived in Nicaragua.

In a Jan. 29 Times article, Mendez denied the accusations, saying the Catholic Church was handing out the government aid in Nicaragua. The story prompted a flurry of volunteers and money, including a $20,000 gift from an Orange County community group.

By Feb. 17, the warehoused cargo containers were at the Port of Los Angeles. That same day, Mendez backed off from his pledge that the Catholic Church would pass out all the goods.

He said four containers carrying mattresses would go to Nicaragua’s first lady. Two days later, he said she would get another container filled with hospital supplies: crutches, sheets, antibiotics and painkillers.

Then, on Feb. 24, the consul said the first lady’s share of the goods had increased to 12 containers.
After the shipment arrived in Nicaragua, 17 days ago, the first lady’s social service operation took control of all 28 containers.

Mendez said Thursday that some of the containers will still be distributed through the Catholic Church but that they went to the first lady because she could move them through customs faster. “She did it to speed things up,” the consul said.

However, the containers on the dock have already been there twice as long as the typical hurricane shipment, the port’s director said.

Mattresses to Hospitals, Not Hurricane Victims

Even before Hurricane Mitch–the worst natural disaster to strike the Western Hemisphere in two centuries–Nicaragua was already one of the poorest countries in the Americas.

In such circumstances, need is relative. And the first lady said the seven hospitals that received about 200 Simmons mattresses March 24 were deserving.

At one hospital, psychiatric patients slept on the floor. But there was not a single hurricane victim at any of the hospitals, according to administrators.

Simmons executives say they are not callous to the needs of Managua’s hospitals, but they noted that their contribution was intended for hurricane survivors in the hardest-hit areas. They had been promised this would be the case in a March 3 letter from Mendez.

“Let me assure you,” the consul wrote, “this donation is going to benefit the victims of this disaster only.”
Mendez said last week that what happened with the mattresses was not his fault. “I did my part here,” he said.

In a November audit by the Nicaraguan controller, the first lady’s office was criticized for not documenting hurricane donations it had received. She disputed the findings of the controller, a political rival of President Aleman. But her office, which is run out of the presidential complex, said it had no records of relief supplies it had received or where they had gone.

Management of international disaster relief is a particularly sensitive subject in Nicaragua. Evidence that dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle misappropriated aid after a 1972 earthquake contributed to growing unrest that exploded into civil war about four years later.

The first lady said some of the Los Angeles containers would go to the Matagalpa and Jinotega areas. Both are strongholds of support for her father’s right-wing Liberal Party.

Critics have accused the government of shipping much of its aid to areas controlled by the ruling party while ignoring such devastated places as Posoltega municipality, which is run by Sandinistas.

On Oct. 30, a tidal wave of mud and water from the Casitas volcano buried more than 1,500 people in a tomb of earth and rocks in Posoltega municipality. Two villages were swallowed up by the mudslide and others were heavily affected.

Government officials deny the accusation that Sandinista-run areas have been neglected, and Mendez said Thursday that he had intended that two containers go to Leon and Chinandega, two Sandinista-run cities.

Yet, criticism persists.

“Posoltega is the grand tragedy of the hurricane and symbolizes the politicization of the aid,” said Maria Lopez, editor of Envio, a monthly news magazine published by the Jesuit-run University of Central America in Managua.

Makeshift Memorials to the Dead

The scar from the mudslide fans out from the 4,600-foot Casitas mountain to a road six miles away. Deep canyons, where torrents roared through, gouge the land. Scattered crosses of gnarled branches and weathered boards memorialize the victims.

On a dry plain just off the highway lies “El Tanque,” a refugee camp of about 1,000 people who once maintained a poor but sustainable existence raising crops and animals on the mountainside.

Named after an old water tank, this is a community of black plastic tents that heat up like an oven under the blazing sun. Water is drawn by hand from wells that run dry each morning when women and children fill their buckets.

Weary residents, such as Jose Inez Rueda, 21, who lost 72 relatives, cannot understand why the Los Angeles shipment of food and other goods sits just an hour away. It reinforces their belief that they have been ignored by their government.

“Why is that aid over there if it is for victims?” asks Miguel Canda, 50. “All we want is for the government to give food to its people.”

Among Canda’s family are six children from 4 months to 12 years old. They get by mainly on monthly handouts from evangelical groups and private organizations.

Each family receives a 50-pound bag of corn for tortillas, two-pound bags of rice and beans and a container of cooking oil.

After waking up, the Canda clan finishes off coffee purchased with money that son Herman, 24, earned working at a tobacco farm. Ruth, 12, nibbles on a piece of hard tortilla left over from the night before.

To stretch the food, they eat the first meal at noon: beans and tortillas. They have the same thing before sleeping. Their rice has run out, Canda says, and relief workers told him that there will be no rice next month.

Baby Christian, Canda’s grandson, is 5 months old. He was born a month premature–and a day after the mudslide while his family waited to be rescued. He is crying. So is his cousin, 2-year-old Elsi.

Canda says they haven’t had milk for eight days.

Elsi’s light brown hair is streaked with dirt and tied in two small ponytails. She wears filthy shorts and rubber sandals, and her belly is hard and bloated.

Her cousin, 2-year-old Eddie, also has a swollen stomach. He sits naked on the ground, smashing ants with his hands.

All the Canda children are sick. Their noses are running and they cough repeatedly. Their eyes are reddened by endless clouds of dust.

Canda reads his Bible out loud. It’s the Book of Revelations, which tells of suffering and natural disaster.
He says the passages help him understand his situation. “Our life,” says Canda, a short man with gapped teeth, “is a battle.”

Aside from his faith, Canda says he is certain of only a few things: Each day will be a struggle. And when the rainy season begins in about a month, El Tanque will become a cold, muddy place.

The fate of the Los Angeles aid–and whether any of it will reach El Tanque–is not so certain.
Nonetheless, the shipment’s long and unfinished journey does provide lessons for future disasters, according to relief experts.

The best thing, they say, is to send money to reputable international organizations or nonprofit groups in the affected countries. In that way, money that would be used for shipping can go directly into aid. And goods typically used by the victims can be purchased locally.

“Financial donations are the best and most flexible way to cope with emergency needs,” said Hugo Prado of the Pan-American Health Organization in Washington. “That’s much better than sending goods.”
*
Times librarian Scott Wilson contributed to this story

Los Angeles Times 
Wednesday June 3, 1998
Alatorre Accused of Using Drugs With City Contractor

Officials: Councilman allegedly steered government work toward businessman. Both have denied wrongdoing.

By ROBERT J. LOPEZ and RICH CONNELL, TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre repeatedly used cocaine with a friend and convicted narcotics offender while aggressively helping him obtain government business, according to allegations contained in court documents and supported by interviews.

Alatorre’s ties to Julian G. Carrasco date back more than 20 years, when the waste hauler and demolition specialist pleaded guilty to possessing and intending to distribute heroin. More recently, the lives of the two men have been entwined in ways that have prompted questions of propriety by government officials and business associates involved in their dealings.

Among other things, documents and interviews disclose that Alatorre wielded his influence in the early and mid-1990s to help Carrasco obtain government contracts, at least twice over the objections of civil servants who believed that public money was being jeopardized.

This occurred at a time when the councilman was regularly showing up at Carrasco’s office in Vernon, where the men allegedly shared cocaine on the contractor’s glass desktop. In addition, the company’s former controller says Carrasco directed him to write a $2,000 corporate check to the councilman but he balked, prompting his boss to instead withdraw cash from a personal account. The controller says he does not know where that money ended up.

Alatorre, through a spokesperson on Tuesday, refused to comment on any aspect of his relationship with Carrasco. In the past, he has issued general denials of any misconduct in his personal or public life.

Carrasco, for his part, flatly disputed the allegations, saying in an interview Tuesday that cocaine “has been out of my life for a long time” and that he has never used the drug “with anyone other than myself.” He said he has no knowledge of whether Alatorre has used drugs.

Carrasco said he and the councilman have been “longtime, loyal friends” but that he did not exploit the relationship for financial gain. He said each of his many government contracts was awarded on merit alone.

Carrasco blamed unhappy former employees for the accusations leveled against him and Alatorre, a man he calls “a peoples’ politician.”

“Everyone has employees that for whatever reasons . . . will say whatever comes to their minds,” he said.

The latest questions swirling around Alatorre come from disparate sources–ranging from records in unconnected court cases to interviews with disaffected former Carrasco employees and front-line public workers.

Taken together, they also appear to bolster accounts by a woman who came forward earlier this year with similar allegations–Alatorre’s former executive secretary.

In recent court documents, she accused the councilman of abusing cocaine and showing up at City Hall with wads of $100 bills after meetings with supporters, up to the time she left in 1995.

Linda M. Ward’s sworn statement, lodged in a bitter custody case involving the Alatorres’ niece, has been disparaged by the councilman as lies by a vindictive ex-girlfriend and disgruntled former employee.

Alatorre has told reporters that the white powder she claims to have seen on his nostrils and clothes might have been dandruff, denture powder or Doritos. The councilman also has insisted that he has not abused any substance since undergoing treatment for alcoholism 10 years ago.

Some of those new accusations have emerged in the custody battle, which has been transformed into an assault on Alatorre’s parental fitness. The Superior Court action was brought by longtime political rival Henry Lozano, who is seeking custody of his 9-year-old daughter, now living with the Alatorres.

Like Ward, Carrasco’s former secretary alleged in a sworn statement filed in the custody case that the councilman abused drugs–an open secret, she said, among the firm’s employees. “It was well known throughout the office staff that the councilman’s visits were for cocaine,” Beverly Vasquez-Bumgardner said.

One of those in the know was the ex-foreman of Carrasco’s now-defunct JCI Environmental Services.
In a signed declaration provided to The Times, Donald Benefield said he witnessed Alatorre preparing or using cocaine with Carrasco about half a dozen times during a several-year period ending in 1995, when the business shut down.

Benefield recalled one Saturday when Carrasco left his office door open. He said he saw Alatorre hunched over, inhaling one of several neatly aligned rows of white powder through a small tube.

“He sniffed it up at the glass desk, right there,” Benefield said in an interview.

Last year, the relationship between the contractor and the councilman became part of an FBI investigation into whether Carrasco’s JCI was improperly dumping hazardous waste. Three former JCI employees told The Times that federal agents asked them whether their boss was supplying drugs and money to Alatorre.

Carrasco said he had no knowledge of the investigation, in which no charges have been filed. It is unclear what, if any, information gathered in that investigation is being cycled into a current federal corruption probe of Alatorre.

Among other things, Alatorre, who also is a board member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, is under investigation by the FBI and Internal Revenue Service for allegedly receiving cash from people with government business and for obtaining help in the purchase and remodeling of his Eagle Rock home–including the falsification of financial records and the financing of a $12,000 tile roof by a prominent government contractor.

Long Relationship With Businessman

Carrasco, 55, was an enterprising businessman who favored a lavish lifestyle. He wore a gold pinkie ring with a diamond in the middle and had a penchant for expensive cars. He also had a grand business vision: to join the ranks of Los Angeles’ giant public works contractors.

To boost his big-league image and highlight his Mexican heritage, Carrasco’s JCI sponsored an award-winning float in the 1995 Rose Parade. The creation, featuring huge Aztec handball players, was promoted in a glossy company brochure picturing Carrasco with Alatorre.

But even as he was striving for recognition, Carrasco’s finances were unraveling. In the spring of 1995, JCI filed for bankruptcy protection, leaving employees unpaid and creditors in line. One of them: the builder of his heralded float.
Carrasco said he is now a partner in a local manufacturing company and does various kinds of consulting work.

Alatorre’s relationship with Carrasco extends at least to the lawmaker’s early years in the Assembly, in the mid-1970s.
Carrasco has said Alatorre has written him letters of reference for public contracts, attesting “to my character.”

Their relationship also predates Carrasco’s 1977 arrest for allegedly arranging the sale of a kilogram of heroin to a federal agent in the El Monte area, according to federal court records. Prosecutors alleged that he was part of a conspiracy to distribute heroin in Southern California.

He pleaded guilty to a single count of possession with intent to distribute the drug, and was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

After his release, Carrasco returned to the waste hauling and demolition business he had begun in the late 1960s. But he had not left his drug days behind, according to former employees.

“Mr. Carrasco was not discreet about his use of cocaine in the office during my tenure,” the businessman’s former secretary, Vasquez-Bumgardner, said in court records. “He was clearly addicted, and his nose required reconstructive surgery on several occasions due to his overuse of cocaine.”

During this time, Vasquez-Bumgardner and other former JCI employees said, Alatorre’s was a familiar face around the office, located in an industrial area beyond the councilman’s Eastside district. He dropped by on workdays and on weekends, they said, staying anywhere from five minutes to an hour.

Vasquez-Bumgardner also said her boss “bragged” about his relationship with the councilman–and the benefits that accrued to both of them. Carrasco openly implied that Alatorre helped him obtain government business because he supplied the lawmaker with drugs, she said in the custody case document.

“Councilman Alatorre will do whatever I tell him, because he needs me,” the secretary quoted Carrasco as saying–a statement Carrasco denies making.

On “many occasions,” Vasquez-Bumgardner said in her court statement, she could hear Alatorre and Carrasco snorting cocaine. She described a morning in 1994 when Alatorre walked out of Carrasco’s office after a “snorting session” with cocaine “around his nostrils and all over his pants.”

“I said, ‘Richard, you have powder on your pants!’ He said, ‘Thanks, Beverly,’ and proceeded to wipe himself down.”
Standing nearby was the firm’s foreman.

“It looked like somebody had been eating a white doughnut,” recalled Benefield who, like other employees, said he is angry with Carrasco for failing to pay him thousands of dollars in salary when the firm went under.

The councilman’s visits became more frequent in the couple of years before JCI’s 1995 closure, Benefield said.

“I’d just see them in there, getting their drugs together,” he said. “It was a common thing between two buddies.”

Another former JCI employee, who requested anonymity, said it was hard to forget some of Alatorre’s visits. One weekend morning in the summer of 1994, he said, the councilman arrived “stumbling, smelling like alcohol.” After about an hour in Carrasco’s office, the councilman emerged “completely re-energized.”

“You could see the powder in his nose,” the worker said.

Both Carrasco and Alatorre were questioned about their relationship and visits in depositions taken in 1994 during a sexual harassment suit filed by Carrasco’s secretary, Vasquez-Bumgardner. Neither of the men, however, was asked about drugs.

Carrasco testified that Alatorre would visit in “spurts”–sometimes up to three times a week–to discuss his political ambitions and ways they could improve the community.

Alatorre, in his deposition, said he could not remember exactly why he paid calls to Carrasco or how often. “I visit a lot of people,” he said. “I may have visited, stopped by and bullshit with the guy.”

Alatorre’s visits, according to JCI’s former controller, were often accompanied by another ritual: requests by Carrasco for money from the firm.

Financial officer Andrew Lee told The Times that he was instructed by Carrasco in 1992 to write Alatorre a company check for approximately $2,000.

As Alatorre waited in Carrasco’s office, Lee said he told his boss it would be improper to put corporate funds in a politician’s pocket.

“He wouldn’t give a reason what it was for,” said Lee, now an accountant for the MTA. “He just said, ‘I owe him some money.’ ”

Lee said he was then told to prepare a check–payable to cash–from Carrasco’s personal account. After doing so,

Lee said, his involvement ended and he is uncertain where the money went.

More often, Lee said, his boss would ask him to dip into the company’s petty cash before or during Alatorre’s visits, withdrawing between $100 and $200 each time. He said the two men would then sometimes leave in the councilman’s car and return a short time later.

Carrasco disputes Lee’s account, saying he never provided the councilman with any money and never requested that cash be made available before or during his visits.

“Of course not,” he said.

Connections to Contracts

Whatever the attraction between the men, Alatorre repeatedly used his considerable political influence to help his friend obtain more than $2 million in local government contracts.

The lawmaker acknowledged in his 1994 deposition that Carrasco often sought his advice and help. “He’s had a lot of business problems,” Alatorre said.

One was at the city’s Department of Water and Power.

Carrasco’s firm had won a 1993 bid to demolish an old DWP service center east of downtown for a fee of $443,000.

But a conflict erupted: Warner Bros. wanted to blow up the building for a Sylvester Stallone film, “Demolition Man.”
Because the job requirements had changed, DWP staffers urged that Carrasco’s contract be terminated and that the job be rebid after the movie makers had finished, when the exact nature of the work would be more clear.

With that looming prospect, Alatorre personally intervened with then-DWP General Manager Daniel Waters, according to a source knowledgeable about the events. Soon after, Waters overruled his staff and allowed Carrasco’s contract to proceed as negotiated, the source said, adding: “You know, Councilman Alatorre is pretty powerful. . . . [Waters]
understood the reality of it.”

Waters acknowledged in an interview that he probably discussed the contract with Alatorre but said he could recall no specifics. He said that whatever actions he took were in the utility’s best interest.

Carrasco agrees. He credits Alatorre with helping to ensure that the lowest and best bid won the day.
“He did the right thing,” Carrasco said of the councilman. “I just told him what was going on. . . . All he did was relay the information that I told him.”

As it turned out, Carrasco would try to obtain even more money from the city after Warner Bros. had demolished some of the building–and before he had even started his own work.

As DWP staffers had feared, the Carrasco contract had left an opening for confusion and bickering. Carrasco informed the department that he wanted an extra $154,000 because the work had been made more difficult by the studio’s partial demolition of the structure–acontention the city disputed.

Warner Bros., which had agreed to cover any additional costs incurred by the city, wrote the agency, warning that Carrasco was trying “to ‘take’ the DWP for all he can.”

Although still battling for more money, Carrasco began the job–one in which Alatorre seemed to take an extraordinary interest.

The DWP manager overseeing Carrasco’s work, Jeri Ardalan, said Alatorre’s personal involvement was more than he had ever witnessed by a council member on a construction matter.

“On a contract like that, when the general manager and . . . Alatorre and everybody are involved, you feel the pressure,” he said.

Among other things, Alatorre showed up at the job site with Carrasco and convened a meeting with DWP executives and staff in his City Hall office to review lingering contract issues.

In the midst of the payment disputes, Carrasco faxed a letter to the DWP general manager seeking a $139,000 payment. The cover sheet noted that it was sent “per Councilman Richard Alatorre.”

Given the problems Carrasco was generating, DWP officials again began debating whether to terminate Carrasco’s agreement and rid themselves of a “troublesome and nonresponsive contractor,” according to internal DWP records.

But, as one DWP memo warned, doing so would mean “Alatorre and hence (General Manager) Waters will probably be upset.” Instead, they decided to let the contract move forward, an action ensuring that “Alatorre and hence Waters is happy.”

Carrasco’s demands for money did not end with the building’s destruction. He sued the DWP for $350,000 beyond the amount of the original contract, alleging that the city had required him to perform extra work and had discriminated against him because of his Latino heritage.

As city lawyers prepared for trial, questions about Carrasco’s “erratic behavior” and possible drug use arose. The deputy city attorney handling the case prodded Carrasco’s former partner to state “whether or not you thought [Carrasco] was using drugs or something.” The ex-partner avoided a direct response, saying: “I don’t want to be any part of that.”

The city’s attorney declined to say what led him to pursue that line of inquiry.
Eventually, the DWP settled, paying $40,000 to Carrasco’s firm, which also received $80,000 from Warner Bros.

During Alatorre’s 1994 deposition in the sexual harassment suit, the councilman said he could remember helping Carrasco’s firm only one time with the DWP. On that occasion, he said, he tried to expedite a payment the firm was owed.

Asked whether he contacted the DWP management in that effort, Alatorre responded: “I’m sure I did, yeah. I don’t know. I don’t recall at this time.”

Dispute Over Transit Business

Alatorre also provided Carrasco with help on another front–JCI’s efforts to obtain a piece of the region’s lucrative transit business, according to documents and interviews with key players.
In late 1991, while the councilman sat on the board of the now-defunct Rapid Transit District, JCI was one of several firms seeking a $2-million contract to clean up hazardous waste. The problem was that RTD staff had rejected

Carrasco’s bid, partly because his price was too high and he had failed to provide required information.
“He was validly shot down,” said Frank Hanok, then the RTD’s assistant director of procurement.

A staff report recommending another firm was sent to the RTD board for approval. But at Alatorre’s insistence, the board rejected the staff opinion, allowing Carrasco to file another bid–a move that Hanok said smacked of improper political tampering.

“Alatorre killed it, sent it back and made sure it went to JCI,” Hanok said of the contract.

Carrasco, in his interview with The Times, said he could not remember anything about the matter.

Carrasco himself has said that Alatorre, while preparing to become the MTA’s first chairman, helped him navigate the bureaucracy on another transit contract.

In late 1992, Carrasco had filed a formal protest after his firm was rejected for a multimillion-dollar waste hauling job, records show. Transit officials had ruled that JCI lacked management and technical expertise.

So he again turned to Alatorre’s office, according to testimony Carrasco gave in the 1994 harassment lawsuit filed against him by his secretary.

Although the contractor’s protest ultimately was denied, he testified that Alatorre used an aide to gather details on competitors’ bids for Carrasco.

Carrasco said in an interview Tuesday that he now has no recollection of the contract, but stressed that any information he may have received on his competitors was publicly available.

The secret of his success, Carrasco said, was to perform admirably and come in with the lowest bids.

“That’s the only way I got any contracts.”

Times researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to this report.

Los Angeles Times
Sunday May 06, 2007
A TIMES INVESTIGATION
: Oversight of paramedics in state haphazard
* There’s no guarantee that rescuers who err, including EMTs, will be reported, investigated or disciplined.
Home Edition, Main News, Page A-1
Metro Desk
106 inches; 3879 words
Type of Material: Infobox (text included here); Infographic; Lead story; Table

By Rich Connell and Robert J. Lopez, Times Staff Writers

A Mustang broadsided Kathy Schroeder’s Hyundai sports coupe in a Palmdale intersection, knocking her unconscious. She woke up wedged against the console, covered with an oily film.

“I just remember my eyes and face burning,” she said, “like bacon sizzling.”

She recalled telling the Los Angeles County Fire Department rescuers at the scene, but said they didn’t flush her eyes.

After being rolled into a private ambulance, she told the attendants too. They didn’t flush her eyes, either, explaining that it would get their floor wet, she said.

By the time the hospital did the flushing, the damage was done. Battery acid and other chemicals had burned her corneas, according to her subsequent lawsuit against her rescuers.

Even now, after five eye surgeries in five years, life on a good day is a blurry video. Unable to resume her job as an advocate for the disabled, Schroeder, now 47, received a $400,000 settlement from the ambulance company.

The people who regulate medical rescuers in Los Angeles County, however, heard nothing about this incident.

County policy requires fire and ambulance officials to report potentially serious medical lapses by paramedics and emergency medical technicians to regulators. But those officials saw no problem with Schroeder’s care. Even after the 2004 settlement, neither rescue provider came forward.

It was not the only such case to escape regulatory scrutiny in recent years.

A Times investigation found that oversight of paramedics and EMTs in California is haphazard at best, with nothing to ensure that potentially problematic cases are reported and investigated, or that errant rescuers are held to account.

Countless lives have been spared and injuries relieved by the state’s medical rescuers, often the frontline caregivers in a crisis. To many people, they are heroes. Their competence, often, is assumed.

But when things go wrong, The Times found, California is not set up to consistently weed out poor performers or dangerous patterns — raising the risk of harm to unsuspecting patients.

With little clout, regulators essentially rely on rescue providers to report on themselves, making it nearly impossible to get a realistic picture of where the system is breaking down or how it is performing overall.

The bureaucracy is fragmented. In contrast to other populous states — such as Texas, Massachusetts and New York — California has no overarching agency to oversee the state’s 15,000 paramedics and 70,000 EMTs.

Paramedics are licensed by and ultimately accountable to the state Emergency Medical Services Authority, which has limited enforcement powers. EMTs, who receive less training and whose duties are more limited, answer to any one of dozens of regional authorities.

“There’s a lack of accountability,” said Dr. David Persse, a former Los Angeles County regulator who left to become the Houston Fire Department’s medical director, partly because the centralized oversight system in Texas was stronger. He cited that state’s ability — lacking in California — to levy steep fines to bring rescue providers into line.

“You got to have some teeth,” he said.

An array of shortcomings

THE Times reviewed all regulatory actions taken against paramedics and EMTs in California from 2000 to 2006. It examined incident logs, patient complaints and assorted legal claims; it interviewed regulators, rescuers and patients. Among the findings:

* There is no coherent system for reporting problems or processing complaints that could lead to discipline.
Los Angeles County regulators, for instance, specifically require fire and ambulance officials to report suspected cases of gross negligence or substance abuse by paramedics and EMTs, but Sacramento and Orange counties have no similar policy.

Even when a policy exists, as in L.A. County, “the interpretation of what fits in there may be different from person to person,” said Carol Meyer, director of the county’s Emergency Medical Services Agency from 2003 until last week.

Without legal authority to penalize anyone for failing to report problems, state officials admit they are stymied. New state laws are needed “to address some of the shortfalls in reporting requirements, so we can get a better picture of what’s happening out there in the field,” said Dr. Cesar A. Aristeiguieta, director of the California Emergency Medical Services Authority.

For the public, there is no single, obvious place to go to register a complaint. Even when someone files a legal action, as in Schroeder’s case, regulators are not necessarily alerted to malpractice awards or settlements.

* The numbers and types of disciplinary actions across regions are strikingly inconsistent.
In six years, the Orange County Emergency Services Agency, with about 2,500 EMTs, revoked two certificates and put one rescuer on probation. Sacramento County took no disciplinary action against its 1,500 EMTs — not even putting anyone on probation.

But in tiny San Luis Obispo County, with about 550 EMTs, 48 were disciplined, including six suspensions and six revocations.

For its part, Los Angeles County takes pride in its oversight of its 15,000 EMTs and by far took the most disciplinary actions statewide. But the vast majority of these actions involve probation, which allows people to continue working under certain conditions. In six years, just one rescuer’s certificate was revoked. Two were suspended.

Former County EMS director Meyer said probation is an effective tool, adding that almost no one disciplined that way has had subsequent problems. But she acknowledged that the regional disparities show the need for centralized certification or licensure of EMTs.

* Communication breakdowns repeatedly occur among regulators and even within fire departments.
EMTs in trouble in one jurisdiction can sometimes start with a clean slate in another. One technician was suspended by Kern County for allegedly impersonating a paramedic, then managed to work and renew her EMT credential in an adjacent jurisdiction.

Paramedics have been suspended or fired by fire departments for patient-care lapses without anyone telling state regulators, as required by law.

Within the city of Los Angeles Fire Department, officials failed to alert their own medical director to instances of alleged medical lapses resulting in death.

* When errant rescuers are identified, regulators don’t always move fast enough to protect the public.
A San Francisco paramedic, placed on probation after being found negligent in caring for an elderly patient who died in 1996, was later accused of improperly treating two other elderly patients who died. The state finally revoked his license last year. By then he had left for Colorado, where he now works.

Two months ago he returned to the Golden State. The reason: to teach about caring for the elderly at a continuing education conference for rescuers. (”News to me,” said Harvey Eisner, director of the conference, of the rescuer’s record. He said he would look into it.)

An Imperial County paramedic was accused of fraud and incompetence in patient deaths in 1999 and 2001 before he lost his license in 2004. The final straw: He was caught repeatedly falsifying a car crash victim’s vital signs. According to a state report, he told his supervisor that everyone does it.

Aristeiguieta said one reason the two cases took so long to resolve was that fire departments and regional agencies were slow to alert the state to the initial incidents. Since his arrival 18 months ago, he said, reporting has improved.

But there still “are instances when we learn of a case many months after the incident by reading a newspaper report,” he said. “That’s troubling.”

‘Holes in the system’

CLOSE monitoring of medical rescuers is crucial, experts say, because they have less training than many other medical professionals. Though paramedics often receive instructions from doctors or nurses by telephone while treating a patient, records show that they can make dangerous mistakes: administering the wrong drugs, ending resuscitation efforts prematurely or failing to transport seriously ill or injured patients.

Aristeiguieta, who sits on the Medical Board of California, said oversight of medical rescuers needs to be brought more in line with that of physicians and nurses. One example: Doctors who pay medical malpractice awards and settlements of more than $30,000 must be reported to state regulators. That requirement “doesn’t exist for EMTs and paramedics,” he said.

Problems with rescuers may or may not be conveyed to fire department or ambulance officials, who may or may not report them to regional regulators, who suffer no penalty if they don’t pass them on to state officials for investigation.

“There are holes in the system,” said Glenn Melnick, a USC healthcare researcher who has studied California’s emergency system. “There’s very likely big gaps in performance that we just don’t know about.”

A large part of the problem is the culture in which the emergency response system developed. It was essentially welded onto fire departments, which functioned primarily as public safety providers with a paramilitary tradition — not as medical caregivers. Now, the bulk of what these departments do is medical response — but their regulatory standards are still catching up with the rest of the medical professions.

California was a national leader in 1970, when it started its first paramedic program in the Los Angeles County Fire Department. The idea was to treat patients within minutes of their injuries, improving prospects for survival and recovery. The heroic exploits of the department’s rescuers were quickly glamorized by the Jack Webb television drama “Emergency.”

Other paramedic programs developed here and there, and the state EMS authority, created in 1981, did not begin regulating paramedics until the mid-1990s.

The network of EMTs evolved separately in the 1970s. But regulation of these medics, many of whom are firefighters, came to be scattered over more than 30 regional agencies. Sometimes the agencies oversee a single county, other times several. Further complicating matters, an even larger number of entities can issue EMT certificates, including some local fire departments.

Though rescuers are often viewed as interchangeable by the public, paramedics must receive 1,000 hours of training –10 times what most EMTs get. Unlike EMTs, who perform basic life support such as CPR and wound care, paramedics can administer drugs, do electrocardiograms and even intubate patients. The two types of rescuers often work in tandem.

Which type arrives after you call 911 varies. The ratio of paramedics to EMTs differs substantially by region. Dispatchers generally send paramedics to the cases deemed more critical, but both types of rescuers work for fire departments and ambulance companies.

Reform efforts have foundered

CALIFORNIA’S problems are not unique: To some extent, they are mirrored around the nation. A study by the National Academy of Sciences last year found that fragmented responsibility, poor data, uneven standards and lack of accountability made it nearly impossible to evaluate the care provided by rescue agencies.

“While most Americans assume that their communities are served by competent [emergency medical] services, the public has no idea whether this is true, and no way to know,” the study found.

But California is further behind, in some ways, than anywhere else: It is the only state that does not have centralized licensing of EMTs.

Texas puts licensing and disciplinary responsibilities for paramedics and EMTs under one state agency. It offers the public a single, easy-to-access online complaint system. Names of disciplined rescuers and their offenses are posted on the Web, much as with doctors in California.

Fire departments and ambulance companies are closely monitored, said the Houston Fire Department’s Persse.
He is required to tell the state about any departure from specific medical standards, and breaches of the rules can bring steep — and highly effective — fines.

Persse recalled a case in 2000 in which an investigation of a single EMT — accused of stopping to grab a doughnut while transporting a stabbed child — led the entire Houston department to be placed on probation. After state regulators found out that the medic’s credential had lapsed, they threatened to impose tens of thousands of dollars in fines unless the department improved monitoring of medical care and tracking of credentials. The city hired eight people for the job.

Recent reform efforts in California have foundered. A bill to have the state EMS Authority license all EMTs was dropped last year, as firefighters pushed for separate legislation that would allow their own departments to take the lead in disciplining EMTs. A new version of the firefighters’ bill is pending.

Separately, the state moved two years ago to tighten its scrutiny of paramedics, when a new law required fire and ambulance agencies to alert regulators whenever they suspended or fired paramedics for patient care lapses, substance abuse or criminal convictions. But many of the agencies said they were not told the law existed.
“I don’t think that was on anybody’s radar screen,” said Meyer, the former Los Angeles County EMS Agency director.
‘I’m not happy about it’

AT the Los Angeles Fire Department, 30 paramedics were suspended and three resigned pending disciplinary action in the last two years, according to a tally prepared for The Times. At least a third of those cases were related to patient care. Not one was reported to the state.

The city of Los Angeles is in some ways more diligent than most. At least it has a medical director, Dr. Marc Eckstein, to review possible problems in the field and report anything serious to county regulators.
In his office at Fire Department headquarters, Eckstein keeps his radio scanner humming. Sometimes he even rolls out on calls.

“In terms of knowing what’s going on,” he said, “I have the pulse.”

Later, The Times provided him with a list of 19 claims for damages against department medics since 2000. Eighteen of them alleged that patients died because of negligence. Most of those claims were dropped or dismissed, but three resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in financial settlements.

Eckstein said he had never seen most of the cases, including the three that were settled. “I’m not happy about it,” said

Eckstein, who has no official standing in the department’s chain of command. “You need to know what’s going on in order to provide the best care.”

One case he never reviewed or reported involved Armenui Agazaryan, a 48-year-old grandmother who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979.

It was approaching midnight when rescuers arrived in her Little Armenia neighborhood in Hollywood in the winter of 2000. Agazaryan had been vomiting. She struggled to breathe.

Anxious relatives wanted her rushed to the hospital. But the paramedics quickly concluded that she had the flu. “They told us … in the U.S. you don’t call 911 for a doctor,” her son, Mike Agazaryan, recalled in an interview. “They said, ‘Don’t call for silly reasons.’ ”

“First of all, she was a U.S. citizen. But it shouldn’t matter,” he said. “She needed help.”

The family was “very intimidated” by the firefighters in their uniforms and badges, he said. “We didn’t want to be rude.”

The rescuers left, he said. Armenui Agazaryan kept vomiting.

Ninety minutes later, the family dialed 911 again. A different paramedic unit rushed the woman to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead from acute pneumonia.

In the end, the city paid the family $150,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging gross negligence and discrimination. Contacted by The Times, two of the rescuers declined to comment. In court records, the city said that the care was appropriate and that the medics had advised calling 911 again if her condition worsened.

“She would be here today,” her son said, “if they had taken her the first time.”

The Fire Department prepared a confidential report on the incident at the request of the city attorney handling the family’s claim, records and interviews indicate. But Eckstein said he never saw it.

Eckstein and his counterparts at other departments have another way to scout for possible problems: It’s called quality assurance or improvement and often involves reviewing a sampling of cases from the field. But that process focuses largely on training and improving medical procedures, not investigating potential lapses that could lead to discipline.

California law essentially says paramedics and EMTs can be disciplined or denied credentials for such lapses as criminal convictions, gross negligence and failing to accurately document what occurred at a scene.

Most regulatory agencies are automatically alerted to criminal convictions by the state Department of Justice. That is the most consistent — and by far the most frequent — reason for disciplinary action against rescuers.

Less cut-and-dried problems related to patient care may go unnoticed entirely, or be deemed unworthy of investigation by rescue providers or regional regulators.

Consider the statistics in Los Angeles County, where rescuers respond to an estimated 600,000 calls a year.
In six years, just 250 unusual incidents (unrelated to criminal or background checks) were reported to regional regulators by any source, including patients, logs show. The number of formal investigations initiated during that time: six.

Whom to turn to for recourse?

SOMETIMES uncertain where to take a patient-care complaint, members of the public may resort, as the Agazaryans did, to legal action. Others may go to the very ambulance company or fire department that they blame for the problem in the first place.

Theresa Hankins, who manages a family-owned electronics store, took her grievance directly to the brass at the Santa Ana Fire Department.

“Dear Deputy Fire Chief,” she wrote, referring to an incident two days earlier in which her husband had collapsed on the floor of the store, gasping for breath. “This is a formal complaint.”

Hankins detailed how paramedics, after a “perfunctory” examination, concluded that Gene Hankins, then 47, was suffering an anxiety attack.

“I was then advised to ‘take him home, get him a beer and let him rest,’ ” she wrote.

By her account, paramedics grudgingly performed an electrocardiogram, or EKG, deeming it inconclusive. They discouraged her from having him transported to a hospital, saying he would not be given medication or hooked to monitors but she would be charged for the ride, she wrote. She recalled them joking among themselves, heedless of the family’s distress. “I had no intention of entrusting Gene’s life to their dubious attentions,” she wrote.

Instead, she drove him to the hospital, where he received emergency surgery for a heart attack, records show. He ultimately recovered.

“If I had trusted the diagnosis rendered by [the] Fire Department,” Hankins wrote, “my husband, Gene Hankins, would most likely be dead.”

Nearly a month later, Deputy Fire Chief Andy Money wrote back, saying a review determined that her husband’s medical care was “within the scope of standardized treatment.”

He said that Hankins’ vital signs and EKG results were within normal limits and that transport to the hospital, though offered, was refused. Money apologized, however, for the “insensitive or abusive comments.”

“The employee responsible for those remarks has been admonished accordingly,” he wrote. With that, the case was closed.

“They didn’t investigate anything,” Theresa Hankins said. “They buried it.”

A Santa Ana Fire Department spokesman referred questions about the incident to an assistant city attorney, who declined to comment, citing confidential medical and personnel issues. One of the rescuers also declined to comment. The others could not be reached.

The case was not reported to county regulators, who pressed Times reporters for details.
In the case of Schroeder, the car crash victim, a spokesman for the ambulance contractor involved said the firm also saw no need for review by regulators, despite the lawsuit.

“There was nothing in the patient care record to indicate that an incident report should have been filed,” said Jason Sorrick of American Medical Response, declining to comment further. The ambulance attendants could not be reached.

Schroeder declined to discuss the settlement, whose details were contained in the court record. Antelope Valley Hospital, also accused by Schroeder of delaying proper care of her eyes, paid her a $250,000 settlement. Officials there declined to comment.

Although Schroeder also sued the Los Angeles County Fire Department, it paid no settlement, records show. The department’s emergency medicine experts did not review what happened until two years after the crash — in response to inquiries from risk management staffers who assess financial exposure.

“There’s nothing here that indicates these guys were being poor paramedics,” said Chief Deputy Gary Lockhart. The paramedics said she complained about an oily substance but not about burning in her eyes, he added.
Schroeder, who is awaiting her second cornea transplant, said she is not bitter about what happened.

She said she retains the utmost respect for paramedics in general and holds no malice toward those involved in her own care. “I don’t think they’re bad people,” she said.

If anything is to come out of her case, she said, she hopes it is a realization that oversight of rescuers should be tightened so patients are better protected.

As it is, “I don’t trust this system,” she said.

rich.connell@latimes.com
robert.lopez@latimes.com
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Times staff writer Doug Smith and researcher John Jackson contributed to this report.