Print.24. Staff photojournalism The Mercury News/East Bay Times

Trump’s tax returns released

Documents reveal how he was able to pay so little — so often

By David Lauter and Don Lee

Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON

>> Former President

Donald Trump’s seven-year battle to keep the public from seeing his taxes ended in defeat Friday as a House committee released six years of returns documenting his aggressive efforts to minimize what he paid the IRS.

Trump and his wife, Melania, paid $750 or less in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017, and zero in 2020, according to the returns released by the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax legislation.

In three other years, Trump paid significant amounts of taxes although as a share of his income, the amounts were far below those of the average taxpayer. The returns show he paid $641,931 in 2015, just under $1 million in 2018 and $133,445 in 2019.

The 2018 payment came on reported adjusted gross income of $24.3 million — an effective tax rate of 4%. By contrast, the average taxpayer in 2018 paid $15,322 in federal income taxes, with an average rate of about 13%, according to the IRS.

The release of the returns — redacted to hide Social Security

numbers and other private information — marked the final act of a saga that outlasted Trump’s presidency and included two trips to the Supreme Court as Trump resisted public disclosure of his financial records. It came in the final days of Democratic control of the House.

The disclosures raise multiple questions about whether Trump’s tax strategies simply took advantage of the law or broke it. Republicans, who denounced the release of the returns as a violation of Trump’s privacy, are unlikely to inquire further once they take

TRAGEDY AND TRIUMPH — THE YEAR IN PICTURES

BAY AREA AIRPORTS

Southwest flights get back on schedule

CEO: Airline ‘off to a great start’ after week of chaos

By Eliyahu Kamisher and Austin Turner Staff writers

Southwest planes took off from rain-soaked tarmacs on Friday, luggage flowed freely around baggage carousels, and thousands of passengers were once again crowding gates at Bay Area airports.

On any other day, this would have been a routine scene with the airline’s significant hubs in Oakland and San Jose. But after this past week’s colossal airline meltdown, wary travelers on the tail end of the most chaotic holiday travel season in decades were wondering: Are things really back to normal?

“Everybody is checking their phones every 20 minutes,” said LaDonna Parham, a professional mentor who spent a night

‘TRIED AND TRUE’

Amid triumph and tragedy, private moments of grief and public spectacles of joy, Mercury News and East Bay Times photojournalists captured the resilience of the human spirit across the Bay Area this year. ¶ The powerful and poignant images recorded our losses — from wildfires and shootings to COVID-19 and abortion rights — and our gains in sports arenas, parades and on playing fields. There were deaths and funerals and festivals that documented the sorrow of the year and also the elation. ¶ The astonishing and the sublime also were captured — sometimes in the same frame. Such was the retirement of a 100-year-old park ranger. ¶ The Bay Area’s beauty is on full display — the sunsets, the salt ponds, the fog and snow. A stunning supermoon, the last of the year, rose behind the Golden Gate Bridge. ¶ We present 2022 through the eyes of Bay Area News Group photographers. See Pages A6 and A7 for more photos.

Santa Clara County mulls a move to ranked voting

Format faces public scrutiny, legal hurdles

By Gabriel Greschler ggreschler@bayareanewsgroup.com

As ranked choice voting gains more popularity in cities across the Bay Area and around the West, Santa Clara County is looking to overhaul its own elections by adopting the system starting in 2024.

If it succeeds in changing the method to select countywide candidates, Santa Clara would be the first stand-alone county in the state to enact the still-controversial system, which eliminates the need for runoff elections by allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference.

But major barriers stand in the county’s way. It’s still legally

BAY AREA NEWS GROUP PHOTOGRAPHERS

KARL MONDON — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

California’s wildfire season started early with the Colorado Fire that burned hundreds of acres in Monterey County. On Jan. 22, the fire burns toward the Bixby Bridge in Big Sur.

JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

A moment of artistry captures the San Francisco Giants’ Yunior Marte pitching against the Milwaukee Brewers at Oracle Park in San Francisco on July 15, composed by combining two exposures.

DAI SUGANO — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

In its third year, the COVID-19 pandemic killed nearly 10,000 people in the Bay Area. The obituary of Stephen Elliott, who died on Jan. 5, is held by his son, Ryan Elliott, on May 4 in Palo Alto.

The thrill of victory bolstered the Golden State Warriors on their way to clinching the NBA championship in June. In Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals playoffs on May 20, Klay Thompson and Stephen Curry (30) celebrated the final moments of a fourth-quarter comeback victory over the Dallas Mavericks at the Chase Center.

MONDON — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

NHAT V. MEYER — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The girls got game! Erin Curtis hugs St. Francis teammate Whitney Wallace as they celebrate their 3-1 win against Archbishop Mitty in the NorCal Open Division Girls Volleyball Championship in Mountain View on Nov. 15.

CRABB — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER UC Berkeley’s attempt to block access to the historic People’s Park for a housing construction project descended into chaos on Aug. 3. Protesters Elisa Smith and Stormy Adams fret as workers fell trees after fencing off access to the park.

Eat

Repeat COVID cases climbing

By Harriet Blair Rowan hrowan@bayareanewsgroup.com

Have you had COVID-19 a second time? Or a third? If so, you are in good company.

New data from California’s public health department shows that in the first three weeks of July, there were more than 50,000 documented reinfections, accounting for 1 in 7 new COVID-19 cases through the middle of the month.

And, as the Golden State approaches 10 million COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic, the number of repeat in-

fections is steadily climbing.

With highly contagious and immunity-dodging variants of the virus like the current king BA.5 battling for dominance, you can get COVID-19 again just a few weeks after you recover.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo joined the club this past week — two months after he first tested positive.

“Symptoms are minor, with intermittent grumpiness,” he tweeted Thursday. “My apologies to anyone I might have exposed in recent hours or days — please test and follow CDC guidelines.”

KICKING

President Joe Biden’s positive test Saturday is different, a “rebound” of the virus, after testing negative for a few days, rather than a reinfection. His physician believes it is connected to a the anti-viral Paxlovid, prescribed to treat his illness after he tested positive July 21.

Reinfection data released for the first time by the California Department of Public Health in response to a request from this news organization shows more than 350,000 reinfections in the past 46 weeks, with a significant climb since the first week of September during the delta surge when just about 2% of cases were known reinfections.

SOCIAL ADDICTION

POLITICS Biden savors needed victories

Wins could reward Dems in November

By Michael D. Shear The New York Times

>> President

WASHINGTON

Joe Biden and his top advisers have tried for months to press forward amid a seemingly endless drumbeat of dispiriting news: rising inflation, high gas prices, a crumbling agenda, a dangerously slowing economy and a plummeting approval rating, even among Democrats.

By Martha Ross mross@bayareanewsgroup.com

Jaimie Nguyen’s use of Instagram started harmlessly enough in the seventh grade. There were group chats to schedule meetings with her volleyball team. She had fun searching for silly, sports-related memes to share with friends.

But pretty quickly, Nguyen, now 16, began spending a large portion of her weekday evenings scrolling through Instagram, TikTok or YouTube. She sought val-

Young people’s fixation with online sites sparks debate about helping them unplug

idation from people liking her posts and became caught up in viewing the endless loop of photos and videos that popped into her feeds, based on her search history. Disturbingly, some posts made her think she could look better if she followed their advice on how to “get thinner” or develop rock-hard abs in two weeks.

“I was eventually on Instagram and TikTok so many hours of the

KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

day that it got super addicting,” said the junior at San Jose’s Evergreen Valley High. Over time, she found it hard to focus on homework and became increasingly irritable around her parents. Experiences like this — a teenager spending increasing blocks of time online with potentially harmful consequences — are at the center of a national debate over whether government should

Ukrainian couple welcomed by Palo Alto retirement community

Back home, elderly pair had taken in war refugees

By Julia Prodis Sulek jsulek@bayareanewsgroup.com

When the retired doctor and his wife fled their home in Ukraine, they took only the most precious things with them — a white linen tablecloth with pink edges hand stitched by her greatgreat-grandmother and a spoonful of dirt from her garden she

keeps in a heart-shaped box.

Anatolii and Mariia Maslianchuk are in their 70s and hold on to hope that they will return to the home they shared for 50 years, the one they opened for days and weeks at a time to refugees from the eastern part of the country needing shelter from the worst of the war.

Now they, too, are refugees, resettling in Palo Alto as guests of the Moldaw Family Residences, a retirement community with Jewish roots that is sponsoring them

with free housing and meals.

“Most of us have been impacted by war,” said Elyse Gerson, whose grandparents fled Nazi Germany. “There are residents here who are Holocaust survivors. My grandparents — I — wouldn’t be here without the kindness of strangers.”

Since the couple arrived at Moldaw three weeks ago, after a circuitous journey that took them through Turkey and Mexico separated them for a time and hos-

require social media companies to protect children and teens’ mental health. As soon as Aug. 1, California legislators will renew discussion over Assembly Bill 2408, a closely watched bill that would penalize Facebook, Snapchat and other large companies for the algorithms and other features they use to keep minors like Jaimie on their platforms for as long as possible. The bill passed the Assembly in May, and an amended version unanimously passed through

SOCIAL >> PAGE 8

But Biden has finally caught a series of breaks. Gas prices, which peaked above $5 a gallon, have fallen every day for more than six weeks and are now closer to $4. After a yearlong debate, Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed legislation this past week to invest $280 billion in areas like semiconductor manufacturing and scientific research to bolster competition with China.

And in a surprise turnabout, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who had singlehandedly held up Biden’s boldest proposals, agreed to a deal that puts the president in a position to make good on promises to lower drug prices, confront climate change and make corporations pay higher taxes.

“The work of the government can be slow and frustrating and sometimes even

Reinfections account for 1 in 7 new California cases this month; virus variants pose threats

JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Jaimie Nguyen, 16, of San Jose was spending almost 3 hours a day on social media, and it started to interfere with her schoolwork. Nguyen said she was able to reduce her social media time to 30 to 40 minutes a day only after removing Instagram and TikTok from her phone.

WANGYUXUAN XU — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Anatolii, left, and Mariia Maslianchuk recount their experiences in their home country of Ukraine before arriving in Palo Alto three weeks ago.

Eat Drink Play: Nine eagerly anticipated Bay Area summer, fall restaurant openings, plus updates on others in the works. F1

Cal coach investigation widens

of the first part of the investigation from SCNG, a partner of the Bay Area News Group, on May 24.

family in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

By Scott Reid SCNG writer

Another 17 athletes have come forward with accounts of alleged abuse at the hands of renowned Cal women’s swim coach Teri McKeever, bringing to 35 the number of former and current swimmers offering detailed stories of bullying amid a Southern

California News Group investigation into McKeever’s three-decade reign.

“She needs to be out of the swimming world,” said Lindsey (King) Loncaric, who swam at Cal during the 2006-07 season. “I don’t care what it says on her résumé. She treats people terribly.” UC Berkeley placed McKeever on leave following publication

The new accounts provide a more complete portrait of McKeever’s alleged behavior, indicating it began earlier, went on longer and was even more personally devastating for Cal swimmers than earlier reported. They also describe a previously untold level of emotional manipulation in team practices and retreats, including McKeever’s reported efforts to cut swimmers off from friends and

Taking shelter in his art

Daniel McClenon is living on the streets because of addictions and mental illness, but he can picture himself doing better after a recent exhibition in San Francisco

Through it all, the swimmers say, officials at one of the nation’s most prestigious public universities ignored or failed to effectively act on repeated complaints of misconduct. McKeever, 60, perhaps the most successful women’s swim coach in history, has won four national swimming championships at Cal, and coached an Olympics team in 2012 that

COVID-19

Vaccine for tots likely on the way

Not all parents eager for kids to get shots, which should arrive this month

By John Woolfolk jwoolfolk@bayareanewsgroup.com

By the end of the month, the United States will reach what White House COVID-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha calls “an important moment in the pandemic.”

“For the first time,” he said last week, “essentially every American, from our oldest to our youngest, would be eligible for the protection that vaccines provide.”

More than two years into the pandemic, COVID-19 vaccines are expected to be ready for kids younger than 5 — as soon as June 21 — with federal agencies poised to authorize them after a series of meetings over the coming week. With so much of the world moving on, despite persistently high infection rates and worrisome new variants, are parents eager for the shots?

By Marisa Kendall mkendall@bayareanewsgroup.com

Daniel McClenon’s art stops people in their tracks.

As he sits on the sidewalk in downtown San Francisco, hunched over his latest drawing, passersby pause to marvel at the skill he uses to capture heartbreakingly beautiful moments. Under his hand, a black and white drawing of Michelangelo’s famous Pieta — a sculpture of a lifeless Jesus in the lap of his grieving mother — takes shape in such realistic detail that it’s hard to believe it’s not a photograph. His portrait of an elderly homeless man captures eyes that shine

COMMENTARY

with a tragic glimmer of hope as they look to the sky.

This spring, McClenon got his first big break when his work was featured in a solo exhibition sponsored by a local nonprofit. His drawings become even more poignant when you know how some of them were created. His regular mediums are cheap ballpoint pens and whiteout, paid for with the change people toss him. His canvases are pieces of cardboard that, come nightfall, double as bedding when he sleeps on the sidewalk outside a Walgreens.

McClenon, who grew up in San Jose, has been homeless for years — living on the streets in

DANIEL » PAGE 15

Steph Curry’s brilliant Game 4 should silence the critics forever

BOSTON » Never question this man’s greatness again.

Ever.

Anyone with half a brain should have known that Steph Curry has been above slander for a long, long time, but after his one-of-a-kind performance in Game 4 of the NBA Finals on Friday night in Boston, there is no longer any room for interpretation or subjectivity.

Curry, one of the greatest players in the history of the NBA, took his legend to a whole new level in the Warriors’ 107-97 win, which evened the series at 2-2 and restored home-court advantage to Golden State in the process. It’s a level that puts him above reproach and the Warriors back in a position to win the title. The numbers will be etched

in the memory of every Warriors fan for decades to come — 43 points, 10 rebounds. The highlights will play on loop for even longer. But it was so much more than that. It was a rebalancing of

For many — especially in the highly vaccinated Bay Area — it’s a moment that’s long overdue. Marisa C. Juárez Burdick of Sunnyvale said she can’t get her “3-year-old vaccinated soon enough.”

“The moment it’s ready, we will be banging down the door to get the shot in her arm ASAP,” she said. “I’m sick of the delays, but, of course, I want it to be effective, so we wait. I’m sick of living constantly cautious when the rest of the adult world with no kids has moved on and left us behind. Families of under-fives need this.”

Preschooler parents like her already are scouring the Bay Area Vaccine Hunters Facebook group for tips on how to secure an appointment for their tots before the post-authorization rush. They’ve

VACCINE » PAGE 9

HOMELESSNESS IN THE BAY AREA

PHOTOS BY RAY CHAVEZ — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Homeless artist Daniel McClenon is reflected with the showcase of his work at the Hospitality House gallery in San Francisco in April.

McClenon sleeps on a sidewalk next to one of his paintings outside a downtown Walgreens on Third Street on May 13.

Another 17 athletes have come forward to say Teri McKeever’s bullying led to lifelong trauma

ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES

Teri McKeever, shown here in 2012 when she was U.S. Olympics swim coach, has been placed on leave amid the mounting accusations.

GUESTS SHINE AT STARLIGHT BALL

Race sees big bucks from labor, developers

Fremont Mayor Lily Mei, Hayward

Councilwoman Aisha Wahab have raised more than $1M combined

By Joseph Geha jgeha@bayareanewsgroup.com

In a six-person race for the open state Senate District 10 seat, two city council members have snagged the lion’s share of campaign contributions — more than $1 million combined.

And one of them, Hayward City Council member Aisha Wahab, also will benefit from an additional $1 million that a powerful public employee union has pledged to raise on her behalf.

Wahab meanwhile had amassed roughly $633,000 in direct contributions as of April 29, a little more than Fremont Mayor Lily Mei, who has raised almost $528,000.

In contrast, the other four candidates have raised less than $100,000 among them, much of that from their own pockets.

The candidates are vying to replace state Sen. Bob Wieckowski, who terms out at the end of this year, to represent a district of 1 million people in Alameda and Santa Clara counties.

or her through the event.

LEFT: Andrew Kunzel, center, dances with other guests and volunteer helpers during the Starlight Ball.

PHOTOS BY DOUG DURAN STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

STANFORD

Tentative deal struck for nurses on strike

the hospitals as they demanded higher wages and additional sta ng to help them cope with a coronavirus pandemic that has forced many to work long, stressful hours.

By Shomik Mukherjee smukherjee@bayareanewsgroup.com

After striking for a full week, the union representing 5,000 hospital nurses reached a tentative contract agreement with Stanford Health Services late Friday that, if ratified this weekend, could see them return to work Tuesday.

Nurses at Stanford Hospital and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital started picketing Monday in front of

After days of negotiations, the nurses union, Committee for Recognition of Nursing Achievement, announced a deal that would raise nurses’ salaries 7% this year, 5% in April 2023 and another 5% in April 2024, and boost their health benefits.

Stanford also guaranteed an additional week of pre-scheduled vacation for all nurses starting in 2024, as well as additional protections against workplace violence, including a new response team at the children’s hospital.

Workers did not picket at the hospitals Saturday in accordance with a Monday-to-Friday strike schedule. If the agreement is ratified, nurses will be back to work as early as Tuesday, the union announced. Traveling nurses have been treating patients since the regular nurses went on strike.

“We stood strong behind our demands for fair contracts that give us the resources and support we need to take care of ourselves, our families and our patients,” Colleen Borges, the union president, said in a statement.

“We are proud to provide worldclass patient care — and are glad the hospitals have finally listened to us,” Borges added.

BICYCLISTS

San Francisco Board of Supervisors votes 7-4 to permanently close 1.5 miles of JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park to cars, a victory for bicycle groups who advocated for years that the popular route go car-free.

The district, after having been redrawn to reflect population shifts picked up in the latest census, includes all of Hayward, Fremont, Union City, Newark, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, as well as a small portion of northeast San Jose.

ALAMEDA

City extends rent control ordinance to buoy marina’s boat live-aboard tenants

By Angelica Cabral acabral@bayareanewsgroup.com

ALAMEDA » Anxious residents of the Barnhill Marina floating homes community reached out to the city last month after being told their rent could be hiked at least 30% by the harbor’s new owner.

But they can stop worrying for now because the City Council unanimously decided Thursday to apply Alameda’s rent stabilization ordinance and COVID-19 eviction moratorium to the dockside houses of 66 residents at the marina near 2394 Mariner Square Drive.

“I follow and work hard on addressing homelessness in our city…and one of the ways you prevent homelessness is not allowing it to happen in the first place,” Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft said.

JAMES BAUGH

Former San Jose eBay executive pleads guilty to stalking a Boston couple who criticized the company in a newsletter — including sending them live insects and advertising orgies at their home address.

ELON MUSK

World’s richest man succeeds in $44 billion takeover of Twitter, but Tesla share price plunges amid investor concerns that the deal could distract him and require him to sell Tesla stock to help pay for it.

TOP: Adam Shari , le , and Ally Brady, both with special needs, dance during the Blue Oaks Church-sponsored Starlight Ball held at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton on Friday. The Starlight Ball provides an in-person prom experience for people with special needs. Each special needs guest is paired with a volunteer buddy to escort him

Party drug gains respect as PTSD treatment

Study shows MDMA could help millions su ering from the psychiatric disorder

By McKenzie Prillaman

Correspondent

Retired Army Sgt. Jonathan

Lubecky couldn’t get the year he spent in Iraq out of his head. Loud noises and people wearing backpacks triggered flashbacks, and he regularly woke up from nightmares in a cold sweat. He tried to take his own life five times between 2006 and 2013.

Afraid that his next suicide attempt would succeed, Lubecky signed up to take part in a clin-

ical research study investigating whether MDMA, commonly known as Molly or Ecstasy, could help tame the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder.

“I thought it’d be fun to do and it might help for a month or two,” said Lubecky, 45. “I was wrong. It’s a f—— miracle.”

The successful treatment of PTSD patients such as Lubecky is catapulting MDMA and other psychedelics into the medical spotlight as promising therapeutic tools. Long stigmatized,

MDMA is proving to be e ective in easing PTSD in rigorous clinical trials conducted at UC San Francisco and other respected medical centers around the globe. Although some scientists remain skeptical, a growing number of researchers say the treatment could potentially help the more than 300 million people worldwide who su er from the psychiatric disorder.

“MDMA allows you to access these really deep traumatic memories in a way that is not anxiety-provoking,” said Jennifer Mitchell, a UCSF neuroscientist who recently led a

Colorful salt ponds are hidden wonders

DEVELOPMENT

Construction resumes on huge tech campus in downtown San Jose

Vast tech site ramping up work again that could boost the larger community

By George Avalos gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com

SAN JOSE » Construction has resumed on a huge tech campus in downtown San Jose, a project that could provide a major boost — and vote of confidence — for the urban core of the Bay Area’s largest city.

Platform 16 development work is now underway again, Boston Properties, the project’s principal owner and developer, said Wednesday, a decision that ends a two-year suspension of work triggered by the business shutdowns linked to the coronavirus outbreak.

“We are thrilled to have recommenced construction at Platform 16,” said Bob Pester, a Boston Properties executive vice president for the Bay Area region.

The resumption of construction arrives at a time when tech companies have resumed a wide-ranging hunt for o ce and research space in Silicon Valley, including San Jose, through completed leases and property purchases.

“The larger South Bay community, and San Jose specifically, continues to see demand for high-quality, creative workspaces outpace supply,” Pester said.

The tech campus, to be located at 440 W. Julian St. in San Jose near the Diridon train station, is being jointly developed by Boston Properties and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

In March 2020, with much fanfare, Boston Properties executives and San Jose city o cials conducted a groundbreaking ceremony to mark the official launch of the project’s construction.

Within days, though, wide-ranging coronaviruslinked business shutdowns forced an abrupt halt of countless endeavors, including the construction of Platform 16. For two years, the prominent site was idle.

“Once a symbol of the pandemic uncertainty, Platform 16 is again a symbol, this time of momentum, the strength of Silicon Valley o ce demand and the pandemic receding,” said Scott Knies, executive director of the San Jose Downtown Association.

The sites, mainly appreciated from a bird’s-eye view, will remain since future development plans are o

By Jane Tyska jtyska@bayareanewsgroup.com

If flying in or out of the Bay Area, you may have noticed San Francisco Bay’s colorful salt ponds from above. Otherwise, many of the ponds, which cover approximately 16,500 acres of the bay and have been used as salt evaporation ponds since the California Gold Rush era, remain a hidden secret.

Most of the ponds were once wetlands in Newark, Hayward and Redwood City. Some are no longer in use, but Cargill Salt continues its opera-

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO

tions in Newark. The salt the company produces is used to manufacture glass, paper, plastic, rubber, textiles, dyes, leather, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. The Cargill plant is capable of crystallizing 500,000 tons of sea salt each year.

After nearly a century of commercial land use, 15,000 acres of salt ponds were set aside in 1979 to create the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

State and federal wildlife agencies also acquired 15,100 acres of South Bay salt pond properties in San Jose’s Alviso district, Union City and

Menlo Park in 2003, launching the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, the largest wetland restoration project on the West Coast, which will be a 50-year e ort.

Last April, in what environmental groups are hailing as a “complete victory,” Cargill Salt announced that it will not appeal a decision by a federal judge that protects Redwood City’s salt ponds from development, e ectively halting its decades-long effort to build thousands of new homes there. The project would have been the largest development on the bayfront since Foster City was built in the 1960s.

Sta writer Aldo Toledo contributed to this report.

Platform 16 is a proposed development with a striking look, featuring 16 terraces in a project that is perched near the banks of the Guadalupe River and a short distance from Google’s Downtown West neighborhood.

Once complete, the development would total 1.1 million square feet and consist of three o ce buildings and a garage on a site bounded by Autumn Parkway, West Julian Street, North Autumn Street, and a railroad line.

“Platform 16 combines an ideal location with the design and amenities that today’s most innovative firms are seeking to recruit, retain, and motivate their workforces,” Pester said.

The first phase of the development will include the construction of a modern o ce building totaling 390,000 square feet. The building is slated to be ready for tenant customizations in late 2024. A below-grade parking garage is also part of phase one.

San Jose city o cials, some who were on hand in the spring of 2020 for the ground-breaking ceremonies for the tech campus, quickly embraced word

CAMPUS » PAGE 2

City leaders trying to get social housing measure on the ballot

By Aldo Toledo atoledo@bayareanewsgroup.com

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO » In an e ort to build more a ordable housing, council members are hoping to put a measure on the November ballot that would allow the city to build, own and operate social housing without the need for developers.

For decades, developers and investors have been the engine for housing production in the Bay Area and the country, but South San Francisco council members unanimously agreed residents should decide whether the city

could be more like Singapore and Vienna, cities with attractive and stable mixed-income public housing.

Under Article 34 of the California Constitution — approved in 1950 as Proposition 10 — voters are required to grant prior approval before any federal, state or local public entity can develop, build or acquire low-rent housing projects in the city. “Low rent housing project” means any urban or rural housing for low-income people financed by public money.

After unanimous approval during a special meeting of the City

Council on Wednesday, council members are getting the ball rolling in hopes of getting the ballot measure on the November ballot.

The draft ballot measure would authorize South San Francisco to develop, build or acquire a number of units equal to 1% of the total number of units existing in the city year over year for three decades.

But Mayor Mark Nagales said in an interview that the council is going back to the drawing board in hopes of increasing the number from 1% to something more substantial, making the city one of the first in the Bay Area and

the country to consider investment in new, mixed-income publicly-run housing.

To the north, San Francisco voters approved Proposition K in 2020, which will allow the city to own and run up to 10,000 units of low-income rental housing. The proposition was championed by the city’s progressive leaders, including State Senator Scott Weiner, assemblyman Phil Ting, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and a number of tenant and housing justice groups.

If South San Francisco proves to be as progressive as its neighbor, the move to build social hous-

ing would launch the city into a new and little-tried housing approach derided by people who fear a return to the public housing of the 1960s and 1970s.

But Councilman James Coleman — who is championing the ballot measure e ort — said the housing South San Francisco could build will look nothing post-war era public housing like St. Louis’s Pruitt Igoe, Chicago’s Cabrini Green or San Francisco’s Geneva Towers.

“We’re trying to deviate from the history of public housing in the US and take the example of Vienna

SAN FRANCISCO BAY

Wetlands in the Alviso district of San Jose on Jan. 27.

Salt ponds seen from this drone view in Newark on Jan. 26.

Jonathan Lubecky, seen with MAPS co-founder Rick Doblin, le , says he has no doubt MDMA lessened his PTSD.

SAN MATEO COUNTY

Four candidates vie for supervisor seat

Contest will determine who replaces Horsley, who has termed out a er serving since 2010

By Aldo Toledo atoledo@bayareanewsgroup.com

Four Peninsula politicos are going head to head in the June 7 primary to determine who will replace Don Horsley on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors to represent the largest district in the county, encompassing mostly open space, coastside communities and a uent suburbs.

Horsley, who has represented the massive area since 2010 and

is currently the board’s president, will be termed out of his post this year along with Carole Groom, who represents District 2, which includes the bayside communities.

Their departure opens up two seats on a board that has historically lacked diversity and which has not had significant changes since David Canepa was elected in 2016.

The four candidates vying for Horsley’s District 3 seat are San

Carlos Councilwoman Laura Parmer-Lohan; workers rights advocate and labor union political director Steven Booker; San Mateo County Harbor District Board Commissioner Virginia Chang Kiraly; and Menlo Park Councilman Ray Mueller — all of whom are hoping to represent the district that stretches from Pacifica down to the Santa Cruz County line and includes cities such as Atherton, Woodside, Portola Valley, San Carlos and parts of Menlo Park and Belmont.

Parmer-Lohan, who has served on the San Carlos council and became the first openly LGBTQ

mayor in Silicon Valley, is running a campaign focused on clean air, housing for all, protecting the county’s coastlines, beaches and open spaces and ensuring the safety of hillside communities threatened by wildfire.

With over 70% of the district being mostly open space, the area is particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise and the e ects of the massive wildfires that have plagued California in the past decade. Led by Horsley, supervisors have made it a priority over the past few years to mitigate the effects of wildfire and climate change, investing money in pres-

GOOD, CLEAN FUN THE MODERN WAY

ervation techniques from erosion control to reducing potential fuels with billy goats.

Palmer-Lohan boasts a key endorsement from Horsley, who said in a news release that she “offers fresh ideas and a bold vision for addressing the challenges… including wildfire prevention, drought and sea-level rise.”

“I cannot think of a more qualified leader,” Horsley said.

Parmer-Lohan conducted a “listen and lead” tour over the past year across the county, and she said she has “engaged hundreds of residents to better un-

MOUNTAIN VIEW Developer envisions mall as life science site

Revival planned for ailing big-box shopping center

By George Avalos gavalos@ bayareanewsgroup.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW » A veteran developer has bought a dying South Bay shopping mall, with plans to convert the big-box retail buildings in the center into spaces to entice life science, biotech and tech companies. Charleston Plaza, located in Mountain View and Palo Alto, has been purchased by Presidio Bay Ventures, according to documents filed on April 1 with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office.

San Francisco-based Presidio Bay Ventures, acting through an affiliate, paid $71.8 million for Charleston Plaza, whose addresses include 2400 E. Charleston Road in Mountain View, the county property records show.

The shopping center, located at a prominent spot near the interchange of U.S. Highway 101 and Rengstor Avenue, has su ered a string of exits or shutdowns of some of its primary retailers in the last few years.

Last year, Bed Bath & Beyond and Best Buy shut their doors at Charleston Plaza. REI Co-op relocated to Sunnyvale, taking over a shuttered Toys R Us store site.

In recent years, consumers have ramped up online shopping, a trend that unleashed a retail apocalypse that was exacerbated by coronavirus-linked economic woes.

“Our plan specific to Charleston Plaza entails redeveloping the

Which plan to curb cost of insulin will win out?

By Ana B. Ibarra CalMatters

Elite NYC school buys site next to emerging campus

current tenant is Vocera Communications, is next to a campus that Avenues is preparing to

By George Avalos gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com

SAN JOSE » An elite New York City school has bought an office building next to its emerging campus in San Jose near the city’s downtown, an indication the school is expanding its education hub.

Avenues:

525 Race

Cushman

Walt Stephenson and Brett Krouskup arranged the purchase. The office building, whose

“The project proposes to demolish one existing o ce building and three warehouse buildings, and redevelop the site for use as a private prekindergarten through 12th-grade school,” documents on file with San Jose city planners show.

The school’s first campus opened in 2012 in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The Avenues website also lists physical campuses in China and Brazil, as well as a digital o ering called Avenues Online. Avenues charges $62,700 a year in tuition at its New York City school. A tuition schedule for the San Jose campus wasn’t posted on the school website.

As consumers, advocates and others prioritize their fight to lower prescription drug costs, insulin is usually first in line. Now, momentum to curb rising insulin costs seems to be building, with policymakers at the state and federal levels rolling out proposals seeking to provide diabetics some long-awaited financial relief. The questions now: What will materialize and how soon?

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration said it is moving forward with a first-in-the-nation plan to manufacture and distribute more a ordable versions of insulin under its generic label, dubbed Cal Rx.

As part of that plan, the administration wants to spend $100 million in this year’s budget. Of that, $50 million to develop lowcost insulin with the help of a drug manufacturer. The other

& Wakefield brokers Erik Hallgrimson,

TOP: Noah Pelchin, second from right, and Alex Morris, both of San Francisco, lie in their derby car named Bathtime while Atticus Kafader, le , plays in bubbles with his brother Odin Kafader, both of San Francisco, during the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Soapbox Derby at McLaren Park on Sunday.

RIGHT: A phoenix soapbox car built by San Francisco Uni ed School District students rolls down John F Shelley Drive during SFMOMA’s Soapbox Derby at McLaren Park.

SOAPBOX DERBY

PHOTOS BY SHAE HAMMOND — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

CONVICTED OF INVESTOR FRAUD

Holmes faces sentencing today

If sentenced to prison by federal judge, Theranos founder is expected to seek delay and appeal

By Ethan Baron ebaron@bayareanewsgroup.com

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, pregnant and the mother of a young son, likely will receive a multiyear prison sentence today, then try to delay her imprisonment and overturn her guilty verdict, legal experts say.

Holmes was convicted by a jury in January of four counts of felony fraud for bilking in -

vestors in her now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup out of more than $144 million with false claims that her technology could conduct a full range of tests using a few drops of blood. She is to appear at 10 a.m. today before Judge Edward Davila, who presided over her four-year criminal fraud case and her four-month trial in U.S. District Court in San Jose.

Last week, Holmes argued in a sentencing memo that she

never “cashed out” on her Theranos holdings — once valued at $4.5 billion — and that she has already received a life sentence of public scorn. She asked Davila to give her no time in prison, or 18 months of home confinement or, at most, 18 months’ imprisonment.

Federal prosecutors, labeling her a remorseless liar and calling her frauds among the worst white-collar crimes Silicon Valley has seen, asked Davila to put her away for 15 years and make her pay $804 million in restitu-

Iconic moments define her legacy

First female speaker of House lauded as ‘master class in wielding power’

By Julia Prodis Sulek jsulek@bayareanewsgroup.com

Perhaps Nancy Pelosi’s defining moment came on Jan. 6, 2021, when video captured her on the phone with the governor of Virginia calmly demanding that National Guard troops be sent in to protect the Capitol from insurrectionists, that the vote to certify Joe Biden’s election must carry on.

Or maybe it was the time, immortalized in a photograph, when she stood up at a White House conference table surrounded by men and pointed her finger at then-President Donald Trump, or after another tense meeting strutted out of the White House in a red wool coat, gave a wry smile and donned her sunglasses.

MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS WINS, LOSSES

Football teammates

By Martha Brennan mbrennan@bayareanewsgroup.com

FREMONT >> There’s little yelling on the sidelines, no hollering in the huddle, zero trash talk on the line of scrimmage.

But as the Eagles line up in formation and prepare for the kickoff, fingers are flying, hands are waving, signals are soaring.

Throughout the season, the team is communicating, fast and furiously, and also, mostly, silently. They are deaf, but for them, deafness isn’t a disadvantage. It’s a superpower.

“We don’t need to have codes because the other team doesn’t know what we’re saying,” says Herminio Gonzalez, head coach of the football team at the Fremont campus of the California School for the Deaf. “The players always know what’s going on, especially if they grew up with a strong deaf culture.”

The school boasts a storied program. Last year, the Eagles’ sister team, the Riverside Cubs, barreled their way through a historic season that made headlines around the country, inspiring an honorary Super Bowl appearance and a Disney+ series. Seven years earlier, ESPN featured the team as part of its E60 series and showed one of its games live on ESPN2 in 2016.

Win or lose on the field, and this year there’s been more losing than winning, the Eagles are a team built on brotherhood and sharpened by camaraderie and a shared purpose. “You have friends in class, but this is a deeper connection. Nothing can beat it,” says Bodhi Amann, 17, a senior from Fremont who plays multiple positions, as do many of his teammates.

California School for the Deaf, or CSD as it is often called, was established in 1860. Its sprawling 91-acre campus is filled with colorful murals, championship banners and, of course, a football field. The Eagles play eight-

California School for the Deaf head coach Herminio Gonzalez signs to Jaxon Dingel (55) and Deven Thornton (58) during their game against California School for the Deaf-Riverside on Sept. 10. California School for the Deaf lost 54-6.

“Nancy has always known how to use power,” said her longtime House colleague, Rep. Anna Eshoo. Eshoo watched with the rest

BAY AREA Tech layoffs slow housing market as prices still fall

By Ethan Varian evarian@bayareanewsgroup.com

Add tech company layoffs to the list of headwinds facing the Bay Area housing market.

Rising mortgage rates, recession fears and a volatile stock market have all tamped down home sales and prices in recent months from record-setting pandemic highs.

Now, entering the traditionally slow winter real estate season, growing uncertainty in the region’s leading industry is giving would-be buyers another reason for pause.

“We have clients who have been in and out of looking at buying,” said Silicon Valley real estate agent Mary Pope-Handy. “One of them works at … Facebook, and they said, ‘I didn’t get laid off, but it doesn’t look like a good time to make a big purchase.’ ”

Already, there are signs an unstable tech industry may be drag-

NANCY PELOSI

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes leaves the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in San Jose on Jan. 3 after a jury found her guilty on four felony counts of defrauding investors.

FREMONT’S CALIFORNIA SCHOOL FOR THE DEAF

PHOTOS BY NHAT V. MEYER — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

California School for the Deaf’s Jaxon Dingel, right, shouts as Devan Vierra, to his right, signs to teammates in the locker room before their game against Trinity Christian at the CSD campus in Fremont on Sept. 1. California School for the Deaf won 66-21.

California School for the Deaf’s Johnte Haggins, right, is pushed out of bounds just short of the goal line against Trinity Christian in the third quarter of their game in Fremont on Sept. 1.

‘so thankful for the brotherhood’

Lawmaker fights to save health care bill

Assemblyman Kalra wants to bring back single-payer idea next year a er push zzles

By Emily DeRuy ederuy@bayareanewsgroup.com

The powerful nurses’ union claims he “chose to just give up on patients.” Fellow Democrats blamed him for setting o a potential fight within the party during an election year.

But Assemblymember Ash Kalra on Tuesday pledged he is not walking away from pushing for single-payer health care in California. He even called out

Gov. Gavin Newsom for pulling back his support of the idea.

“I’m absolutely interested in reintroducing a single-payer health care bill next year,” the San Jose Democrat said during a phone interview Tuesday, the day after his controversial proposal to eliminate private insurance in favor of universal coverage died in the state Assembly. His bill, Assembly Bill 1400, needed to pass the lower house by Monday to have a chance at

moving forward, but Kalra said he didn’t have the votes.

Supporters of the plan, including the California Nurses Association, say it would guarantee all residents of the state equal access to care and keep what they call profit-hungry insurance corporations from making life-altering care decisions.

But detractors like the California Chamber of Commerce argue it would dramatically increase taxes and could send doctors fleeing to other states, upending the Golden State’s health care system while it is reeling from the pan-

KALRA » PAGE 3

Vietnamese community greets Lunar New Year

Assemblyman Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, wants to reintroduce his single-payer health care bill next year a er it died in the state Assembly on Monday.

CRIME

Chilean gangs linked to burglaries

Atherton police chief says enclave had six related to criminal group in January

By Aldo Toledo atoledo@bayareanewsgroup.com

ATHERTON » Chilean gang members linked to a nationwide crime ring targeting the wealthy have smashed their way into six homes in Atherton since January, police said, continuing a trend of highprofile burglaries in the community over the past few years.

During an announcement to the community this week, Atherton Chief of Police Steven McCulley said the department has been investigating eight residential burglaries across town since the start of the year.

He said the department suspects six of those burglaries were committed by organized Chilean gang members from the Los Angeles area, a group that has been notorious for operating clandestine burglaries at night in a uent communities across the country and using inventive break-in techniques to steal thousands of dollars of property.

Since the start of 2021, Ather-

ATHERTON » PAGE 2

Year on Tuesday. The Vietnamese community celebrates the Lunar New Year, Tet for Tet Nguyên Ðán, which means “Feast of the First Morning” in English, a major holiday bringing family and friends together to usher in the Year of the Tiger.

Right: Dung Lu, of Livermore, o ers incense at the temple on Tuesday.

tual protest over Zoom on Tuesday that Pacific

Ballot push for water projects o table for now

By Paul Rogers progers@bayareanewsgroup.com

Supporters of a proposed November ballot measure to provide billions of dollars to build dams, desalination plants and other large water projects in California announced Tuesday they are ending their campaign due to lack of signatures and funding.

By Summer Lin slin@bayareanewsgroup.com

Wildfire survivors and advocates learned during a vir -

structure Safety said Monday that PG&E will be granted the certificate, which will remain in e ect for 12 months, according to a news release. The safety certificate doesn’t mean

But critics of the

were angered the announcement was made late in the afternoon and ahead of their scheduled meeting with the governor.

“It was posted after 4 p.m. yesterday. That is not a coincidence,” said Peter Woiwode with

“Despite crafting an initiative that would solve California’s challenge of chronic and worsening water scarcity, and despite recent polling that indicates over 70% of California’s voters support increased state spending on water infrastructure, the campaign has been unable to attract the finan-

SAN JOSE

TOWERING FLAMES FORCE MORE TO FLEE

INSIDE BASEBALL

A’s woes traced to Selig in new book

Co-owner details Dubs owner’s failed bid to buy team in his autobiography

By Jon Becker jbecker@bayareanewsgroup.com

To many A’s fans, team owner John Fisher is the ultimate villain. Fisher has slashed the team’s payroll in half while increasing ticket and parking prices to watch his team careen toward the second 100-loss season ever in Oakland. But a recent revelation from one of the richest and most successful owners in sports points the finger for the A’s woes at none other than former baseball commissioner Bud Selig.

Warriors owner Joe Lacob offered A’s fans a potential alternate reality by disclosing he had an agreement to purchase the A’s years ago — only to have Selig torpedo it.

In “Long Schott,” a remarkably insightful book by and about former A’s co-owner Stephen Schott, co-authored by the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Shea, Lacob talked about his failed 2005 deal to buy the A’s from Schott for $180 million.

“I’ll never forget it,” Lacob told Shea, before describing how Selig not only dismissed the deal out of hand, the commissioner didn’t bother calling him back. “So I had the Oakland A’s agreed to … and it got yanked from under me.

I was really pissed at Bud Selig.”

By Jakob Rodgers and Gabriel Greschler

Staff writers

Hot and tinder-dry weather today is expected to further test firefighters battling the explosive Oak Fire west of Yosemite National Park, which barreled out of control over the weekend into California’s largest fire of the year, forcing thousands of people to flee from their homes. Fire crews issued several fresh evacuations on Sunday as the blaze metastasized in several directions — overtaking the communities of Jerseydale, Darrah and Lushmeadows while threatening the small enclaves of Bootjack and Mariposa Pines. But with nothing in the way of rain or cooler temperatures in the forecast, fire crews braced for more erratic fire behavior, while warning that the number of destroyed structures was likely to increase in the days ahead from an initial count of 10.

Embers kicked up by the blaze started additional fires 2 miles ahead, confounding firefighters. And on Sunday afternoon, another blaze — the Wheeler Fire — ignited just to the north of the Oak Fire, forcing some fire crews to peel off and battle it instead.

As of Sunday morning, the blaze remained 0% contained after having charred 14,281 acres. Slightly more than 3,000 people were under evacuation, and another 1,900 people were

on standby Sunday afternoon along the fire’s southwest and northeast flanks, said Natasha Fouts, a Cal Fire spokeswoman. At least 2,600 structures are under threat.

“Since we’re heading toward the end of July, it’s not going too be cooling down anytime soon,” Fouts said.

“We’re just doing our best to put in lines and try to hold them.”

The blaze frayed the nerves and emotions of a region all too accus tomed to wildfires this summer — having just endured the Washburn Fire 10-15 miles to the east in Yosem

ite’s famed Mariposa Grove. It came close to charring some of the park’s most popular giant sequoia trees and a historic nearby tourist town.

Evacuees of the latest firestorm were left with little to do but hope that their houses survived. Several said the flames appeared to move with unusual speed — fed by a land scape left aching for water after three years of historic drought.

“The flames were shooting 100 feet tall,” said David Lee, the kitchen manager at The Hideout Saloon in Mariposa, who fled his house Friday in unincorporated Mariposa County.

“It was headed straight for us. That fire was by far the fastest I’ve ever seen. When it hit its roll, there’s noth ing that was going to stop it.”

On Sunday, Lee, 55, assumed his house was destroyed. He also girded for the possibility of evacuating a second time from his friend’s house

SIGN OF THINGS TO COME?

State’s fire season had been off to a great start. Latest blaze may mean that luck has run out

Paul Rogers progers@bayareanewsgroup.com

ried about as California struggles through a third year of severe drought. It might seem like a commonplace event after several years

of record wildfires. But until the Oak Fire began on Friday, the state was off to a surprisingly promising start to this summer’s wildfire season.

A Bay Area News Group analysis of data from the National

Interagency Fire Center in Boise found that just 33,592 acres burned statewide from Jan. 1 to July 19 on federal, state and privately owned lands. That’s the lowest total over that time since

Selig, meanwhile, steered Schott and his late business partner Ken Hoffman toward two men he knew, Fisher and Lew Wolff, Selig’s old fraternity brother at the University of Wisconsin, who essentially copied Lacob’s term sheet to complete a $180 million purchase.

“Nothing against Joe Lacob. I thought John Fisher and Lew Wolff would be a great

months ahead.

During the first half of this year, foreclosure starts in the five-county region jumped 90% compared to the same period in 2021, according to new data from real estate analytics firm ATTOM. Still, the number of Bay Area foreclosure filings — one for every 1,419 housing units — remains below pre-pandemic levels.

“We would need to see an exponential increase before the Bay Area market would start to

More than 2,600 structures threatened by blaze burning west of Yosemite National Park; over 14,000 acres consumed; dead fuel feeds the explosion

Capitol. But police released few new details about the shooting, as they continued to look for the suspected gunmen, including serving search warrants at three homes in the Sacramento area.

Police did announce the arrest of Dandrae Martin, 26, as a “related suspect.” He was booked early Monday into the Sacramento County jail on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon or firearm and illegal possession of a loaded firearm, both felonies.

Jail records show Martin had an outstanding arrest warrant from Riverside County in connection with a 2014 domestic violence case, for which he was sentenced to three years’ probation, according to court documents.

Killed in the violence were Sergio Harris, 38, of North Highlands; Johntaya Alexander, 21, of Elk Grove; Melinda Davis, 57; Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32, of Salinas; Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21 of Selma; and De’Vazia Turner, 29, of Carmichael, according to the Sacramento County Coroner’s O ce.

Another 12 people were taken to nearby hospitals with gunshot wounds, though their conditions Monday afternoon re-

Embryos

FROM PAGE 1

disease in their family,” said pediatric medical geneticist Dr. Akash Kumar, co-founder of MyOme, a Menlo Park-based genome sequencing company. “Our hope is that by providing information relevant to the diseases that they care about, they can feel like they’re more empowered.”

For now, this powerful and potentially life-tinkering advance is still in the research phase and only applies to embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization , not ones naturally conceived. But if it becomes commercially available, it could relieve the burden on families and health systems by reducing the number of people born at risk of those illnesses.

Kumar’s team reported its findings in the March 21 issue of the journal Nature Medicine.

Still, bioethicists and fertility experts warn, there is not yet a full understanding of the technique’s potential benefits — or dangers.

While such testing

mained unknown. They were shot in a hail of bullets that also damaged at least three buildings and three vehicles, Sacramento police said Monday.

Several of those slain had begun the night seeking a fun time in the heart of downtown Sacramento.

Turner was a father of four children who had just finished eating dinner and taking a shower at his mother’s house before going out to a birthday party at a club Saturday night, said his mother, Penelope Scott. “This hurts. You’re taking lives from families,” Scott said of the assailants. “Why can’t people just go out and have fun?”

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The shooting comes as gun violence across the nation continues to surge — a pandemic-era trend that has shown few signs of relenting over the last two years, said John J. Donohue III, a Stanford University law professor.

“We are in this really unhealthy explosion of shootings in the U.S.,” Donohue said. “Which is really somewhat of a strange pathology right now because crime itself is not spiking sharply, but shootings are. So there’s clearly something unique about this moment.”

Even so, the shooting in Sacramento appeared to stand apart from other mass shooting events in the country, experts said.

leaving the Bay Area’s average gas prices well above $5.

Even before Russia began amassing troops along the Ukrainian border sparking concerns over an invasion, California’s gas prices were already high at over $4.60 a gallon, as fuel demand swung from a pandemic travel collapse that briefly plunged oil prices into negative territory to surging vehicle trips fueled by the economy reopening.

Russia

FROM PAGE 1

In Moscow on Monday, Putin said nothing about his war in Ukraine, but his spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the Kremlin “categorically” denied “any allegations” of Russian involvement in the atrocities. Instead, Russia’s state media aired relentless conspiracy theories about what it said was a Ukrainian fabrication, while authorities threatened to prosecute anyone who publicly blamed Russians for the Bucha killings. Russia said the bodies had been placed only recently on the streets after “all Russian units withdrew completely from Bucha” around Wednesday.

But a review of videos and satellite imagery by The New York Times shows

“He didn’t say too much, but his demeanor said a lot. Just his presence,” said his aunt, Mary Fair. “He was very fashionable — you see a guy with long dreads, always smelling good, with brand-new shoes. He’s just a regular type of guy.”

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SJM-L-SACMAIN-0405-90.pdf

MediaServer keywords: Pai (408) 920-5496 pai@bayareanewsgroup.com

Artist & ext.: Dept. general email:

In his free time, Harris loved sports and weightlifting. A father of three from Sacramento’s Del Paso Heights neighborhood, he was working toward his goal of starting businesses of his own.

sounds seductive, it raises an unsettling ethical question: When it is right for prospective parents to do “quality control”?

“I wouldn’t do it, or recommend others do it,” without proven accuracy and careful genetic counseling, said Hank Greely, director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Law and the Biosciences and author of the book “The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction,” which explores the ethical and legal challenges posed by new reproductive technologies.

“Does it make sense to look for relatively small risks in conditions that may well happen long in the future — if at all — and to use those as the basis for selecting embryos?” he asked.

Genetic testing of embryos is usually o ered only to families at risk of deadly and incurable single-gene disorders such as Huntington’s or Tay-Sachs disease. It spares parents the heartbreak of conceiving a child who will inevitably sicken.

What’s new — and controversial — is the technique’s ability to assess an embryo’s risk for much more common, genetically

California’s gas prices are also typically more than $1.20 higher than the national average due to a combination of higher taxes, environmental regulations, and according to some analysts, larger profit margins in the oil industry. Now the main issue, said De Haan, is Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Without a resolution to the war, which has sparked a massive humanitarian crisis, the price of crude oil will remain elevated translating to prices at the pump. On Monday, crude oil prices moved back over $100 a barrel as the mar-

that many of the civilians were killed more than three weeks ago, when Russia’s military was in control of the town.

The war in Ukraine may now be headed for an even more dangerous phase, despite Russia’s withdrawal last week from areas near Kyiv. Ukrainian and Western officials said that Russia appeared to be positioning troops for an intensified assault in the eastern Donbas area, where the port city of Mariupol remains under a brutal siege. And in Kharkiv, roughly 30 miles from the Russian border, unrelenting bombardment has left parts of the city of 1.4 million unrecognizable.

The systematic destruction produces little military gain, but is part of a broader strategy to seize the country’s east, analysts and U.S. military o cials say. With the Russian econ-

“He had a legacy. He wasn’t just an ordinary person,” Fair added. “He had dreams and he had goals and he was achieving them, too.”

Add keywords here graphics@bayareanewsgroup.com

Davis was a homeless woman who had spent years living on the block where the gunfire erupted Sunday. She died in the same barrage of gunfi re as Alexander, who was attending a

complex and treatable inherited diseases, such as breast and prostate cancer. Such genetic risk prediction is being tested in adults but, until now, has not been applied to embryos.

The technique used in the study, called preimplantation genetic testing, or PGT, can only be done on embryos created using IVF, where eggs and sperm meet in a petri dish. That alone is an emotionally and financially draining procedure — but also increasingly common, representing at least 5% of all births in metro areas such as San Francisco.

IVF embryos are already judged on general fitness, such as the number and quality of their cells. Only the best embryos are implanted; lesser embryos are stored or discarded.

The research team — a collaboration of physicians, bioinformatics experts, computer engineers and others with MyOme, the San Carlos DNA testing company Natera, and the Bay Area-wide fertility clinic Spring Fertility — is now expanding the effort, enrolling 20 couples in the Bay Area who are using

ket watched the European Union mull new sanctions on Russia.

But if there is an end to the bloodshed, the e ect of the confl ict will still be felt for years to come on drivers since major companies, including Exxon, Shell and British Petroleum, have abandoned their investments in Russia.

“There’s going to be some scars,” said De Haan. “Nobody is going to go back to business as normal.”

Another issue with retail gasoline prices is that they have a history of rising quickly in tandem with oil prices falling back slowly

omy showing some signs of resilience after the initial shock of the wide-ranging Western sanctions put in place after Putin’s invasion in February, the Kremlin appeared to be girding for a continuation of the war, despite talk in European capitals of now possibly banning Russian coal, oil or, less likely, gas.

“They are not going to stop,” Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, said in a statement Monday. “Putin’s order given to his soldiers to destroy our state has not disappeared.”

In a visit to Bucha on Monday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine left the door open to a negotiated peace, despite the horrific scenes uncovered over the weekend. In a camouflage bulletproof vest, surrounded by soldiers and journalists, Zelenskyy ac-

club event downtown when the shooting happened, according to her cousin Rashea Allen. By the time she was 21, Alexander was attending school, working at Subway and had her own business as a cosmetologist, styling lace-front wigs for clients. She had her own apartment and was “very well-established” for her age, Allen said. “She had a lot of milestones that most of women her age didn’t get to do,” Allen added.

The shooting — the second mass casualty shooting to take place in Sacramento in the last five weeks — prompted fresh calls for gun control legislation,

IVF.

The practice would be legal in the United States because such procedures are self-regulated by the clinicians who provide them.

The researchers agree that the clinical utility of its approach remains to be proved. The exercise was strictly experimental, said the Stanford-trained Kumar.

Applying powerful computational tools to parental and embryonic DNA, the team reconstructed the full genomes of 110 five-dayold embryos from 10 couples who had undergone in vitro fertilization. When matched against the genome of the resulting baby, it was 98% accurate. The method is much more accurate than the current approach of gene sequencing from only the embryo, they said.

Then they peered into the genome to predict the embryo’s susceptibility for common diseases that may develop decades later: breast cancer, colorectal cancer, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, atrial fibrillation, coronary artery disease, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, lupus, vitiligo,

along with a growing concern about the rising tide of gun violence in California and the U.S.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., called on Congress to pass legislation requiring universal background checks for gun purchases, and to take action to ban high-capacity ammunition magazines, military-style assault weapons and untraceable “ghost guns.”

“Enough is enough,” Feinstein said in a statement Monday. “We can no longer ignore gun violence in our communities. Congress knows what steps must be taken to stop the mass shootings, we just have to act.”

and Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.

Each embryo was assigned a “risk score,” based on a calculated percentage that it would develop a specific disease. Such scores are possible because scientists have large genetic data sets of adults with these ailments.

In one example, some embryos in the study had double the risk of atrial fibrillation than others.

In another example, 13 of 20 embryos from a couple with a family history of breast cancer were found to carry the pathogenic BRCA1 mutation, which may greatly increase the chance of breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

Such testing demands a broader societal discussion before it moves beyond the research setting, said bioethicists.

By the time today’s embryos are adults, there may be e ective treatments for these diseases, they noted.

There are other issues. For instance, not enough is currently known about the complex genetic contributors to these diseases to create tests that are accurate enough for embryo

Often, such incidents are the result of some premediated violence — a person seeking to inflict harm on a predetermined list or group of people, or out to prove a point by inflicting harm on as many people as possible, said Peter Langman, who has extensively studied certain types of mass shootings as a contract researcher with the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center.

Rarely does so much bloodshed come from more spur-of-the-moment acts of violence, Langman said.

“If it is something that just erupted,” Langman said of the Sacramento shooting, “what sets it apart is the scale — the number of people killed or injured.”

selection, said Art Caplan, professor of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Many common diseases are influenced not just by genetics, but also by the environment, such as smoking, exercise and access to healthy foods, he added.

Almost all of us have some genetic risk of these diseases, he added.

“As much as we want to believe that we can test our way to immortality, it’s just not true. Everybody flunks genetic tests,” he said. “We’re all going to get sick from something.”

If such tests are someday proven to be accurate and useful, “parents, if well counseled, should be able to make their own decisions” about its use, said Stanford’s Greely. “But one can reasonably worry about just how well counseled or informed the patients will be.”

But before tests are widely available to the public, the U.S. must set standards of reliability and accountability, Caplan said.

“I don’t think people would be well served,” he said, “by getting a printout: ‘Here’s your kid’s profile.’ ”

tailers,” said Sweeney, explaining the gap between oil prices and what drivers see at gas stations. “That sometimes takes several weeks.”

The psychological e ect of the soaring prices on drivers might be around even longer.

For Nola Hardy, an Oakland resident who was paying $5.97 at a Chevron station to fi ll up her car on Monday, the sustained spike in gas prices means she is going to stay put more often.

even when oil prices drop, a principle economists refer to as “up like a rocket, down like a feather.”

cused Russia of “genocide,” but said he was still hoping to meet with Putin to try to stop the war.

“Ukraine must have peace,” Zelenskyy said. “We are in Europe in the 21st century. We will continue e orts diplomatically and militarily.”

Biden, speaking to reporters in Washington after returning from Delaware, said that “information” needed to be gathered for a trial of Putin, calling the Russian leader a “war criminal.” Biden said he would at some point be announcing more sanctions against Russia, without specifying what they would be.

In Europe, the growing evidence of Russian atrocities also appeared to be paving the way for more sanctions, even as divisions remained among EU members of whether to impose a broad ban on Russian energy imports.

“Nothing requires gasoline retailers to push down their price other than the competition with other re-

“Today there are very clear signs of war crimes,” Macron, the French president, told France Inter radio. “Those who were responsible for those crimes will have to answer for them.”

EU ambassadors will meet Wednesday to discuss another package of sanctions against Russia, but the extent of the new measures is still very much in flux, diplomats and officials said. A meeting of NATO defense ministers is also scheduled to take place that day.

Since the start of the conflict, European leaders, along with the United States, have pursued a strategy of putting sanctions in place a piece at a time, gradually toughening them to leave themselves more cards to play in case Russia escalates the conflict.

But the outrage over the new revelations of atrocities

“It’s awfully high, especially if you’re on a fi xed income,” said Hardy. “I won’t be driving as much.”

may force their hand.

One version of a new EU sanctions package under consideration could include a ban on Russian coal, but not oil and gas, EU ocials said. Bans on Russian goods entering EU ports are also under consideration, as well as smaller measures to close loopholes in existing sanctions, European diplomats and o cials said.

Still, the Bucha revelations did prompt Germany and France — two countries that have long been careful to avoid provoking Russia — to escalate the confrontation with Moscow.

Germany said it would expel 40 Russian diplomats, an unusually high number for a single round of expulsions that Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said was necessitated by the “incredible brutality on the part of the Russian leadership and those who follow its propaganda.”

JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Antoinette Walker cries on the shoulder of Frank Turner as Penelope Scott speaks to the media in Sacramento on Monday. Son and brother De’Vazia Turner was killed in a mass shooting.

Obits

FROM PAGE A1

Acute stubbornness.

“Anybody could read into that and understand,” Jason Elliott said, “that odds are he probably didn’t have a vaccine.”

As Americans near a cruel milestone of 1 million COVID deaths, personal obituaries like Stephen Elliott’s, humble death notices written by family and friends, have become a heartbreaking historical record of the worst pandemic of our lives.

In carefully worded expressions of pain and regret, published in newspapers and online, they chronicle the virus’s surges, mandates and breakthroughs, and the cultural clashes and family turmoil that continue to divide the country. And they reveal, through their numbers and tone, how we have struggled in the COVID era with the oppressive ubiquity of death, a subject so many of us spend our lives avoiding.

With gatherings banned for much of the last two years, obituaries often bore the weight of a funeral, the significance of a eulogy.

No longer did they carry the comforting clichés that a loved one had died surrounded by family, a timehonored deathbed ritual that proved a family’s devotion, and, for the dying, suggested a final state of grace.

Instead, the pandemic obituaries often shared how loved ones “suffered greatly from the COVID-19 virus and the separation from much-loved family.” They pleaded for family and friends “in lieu of flowers,” to “please wear your mask and comply with county health orders.” And, ultimately, they often spelled out their loved one’s vaccine status, sometimes like the Elliotts did, and other times explaining that the relative had died “despite being vaccinated and boosted” to blunt the stigma of a careless death.

Now, America is left with a million deaths, a million obituaries and a million families searching for the right words to sum up a lifetime cut short and complicated by COVID-19.

“That’s a million stories that are just as heartbreaking as mine,” said Lyn Balistreri, who wrote her mother’s obituary after she died in a San Jose nursing home at the height of the first winter surge.

“And it’s not just a million stories. It’s hundreds of millions of stories because everybody who died has extended family and friends who love them. It is the human suffering, not just the victims who died, but the people who are left behind.

It’s kind of unfathomable.”

March 17, 2020

Stacey had held her hand, apologized for those times she had been “a bad daughter,” and told her the family would be OK, that it was alright to let go.

When her father died of COVID, she was denied that closure, and wanted the world to know in his obituary: “His family wished they could have been there with him, but due to Covid-19,” she wrote, “Gary passed without family by his side.”

Gary Young died so early in the pandemic, on the first day of the Bay Area’s unprecedented lockdown in March 2020, that Stacey was shocked when a security guard outside St. Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy stopped her from rushing in. “I flat out told him, ‘You’re not keeping me out here,’” she said. “I was bawling my eyes out and I said, ‘My dad is dying,’ and he let me in.”

Just as she arrived at the windows outside her father’s hospital room, she watched the nurses turn off the heart monitor. Her father, who was such a people person that his goodbyes at parties could take an hour, died without a single friend or relative at his bedside.

“I couldn’t say those last words to my dad. He couldn’t hear my voice. He couldn’t feel the comfort of me holding his hand as he took his last breath,” she said. “COVID didn’t just take my dad, it took everything surrounding his death for me.”

To try to make up for what was lost, she said, “I wanted to be able to give him that perfect obituary.”

In her pajamas on the couch, she tapped it out on her phone:

The 66-year-old retired cabinet maker worked at Lowe’s and was known “for his corny jokes, his big heart, and his ‘good morning’ greeting no matter the time of day.”

Then, with a casual certainty that now seems naïve, she included plans for “His celebration of life … on Saturday, June 27, 2020 at 2pm.”

Her mother’s service had drawn nearly 100 to pay their respects, but with county health officers discouraging all gatherings in 2020, fewer than 10 people showed up in her backyard to remember her father. Even her brother from Illinois didn’t risk it.

Back then, who could imagine the lockdown would last so long, much less become a fixture of our lives?

“I had no idea,” she said, “what the world was getting into.”

Jan. 5, 2021

Jo-Anne Balistreri, 90, San Jose

U.S. COVID deaths at the time: 370,550 | California: 35,935 | Bay Area: 3,272

Gary Young, 66, Gilroy

U.S. COVID deaths at the time: 152 | California: 24 | Bay Area: 12

When Stacey Silva’s mother died of cancer the year before the pandemic, the whole family had gathered around her bedside.

If the pandemic took away the final days of togetherness for loved ones, it brought a special kind of misery to nursing homes, where so many elderly Americans died after months of painful isolation.

At Skyline Healthcare Center in San Jose, a stroke had damaged Jo-Anne Balistreri’s cognition and left

her unable to speak, so when family members showed up with balloons on her 90th birthday and waved from outside her window, she looked bewildered. “She didn’t understand why we couldn’t come in,” her daughter, Lyn, said. “There’s always that wondering of whether she just felt abandoned by us.”

By early December 2020,

county health officials were investigating a COVID outbreak and sending reinforcements to Skyline, where more than 80 people had been infected. Hospitals would soon be overwhelmed by California’s deadliest surge, but the delivery of the first COVID vaccines, which were to be expedited to nursing homes, was only weeks

away. Jo-Anne’s family had hoped she would live long enough to feel their embrace. But days before she was to receive a first vaccine shot, she tested positive for the virus. She died on Jan. 5, 2021.

In the first months of the pandemic, nearly half of the country’s COVID deaths were among nursing home residents, but the death

rate fell dramatically when vaccines became available. Ultimately, the virus has killed more than 200,000 in America’s nursing homes. Some of Lyn’s relatives dismissed the idea that COVID had been a prime factor in her mother’s death because she already suffered from a number of chronic conditions. But Lyn insisted on making a point of it in the obituary: Her mother had died “briefly after contracting COVID-19,” Lyn wrote. “She deserved much better and should have had her loving family around her.”

She loved animals, became the family breadwinner working as an accountant at Cypress Semiconductor in the ’80s when her husband became disabled, and “never lost her wry sense of humor or sharp wit.”

Near the end, in a direct message to the mother she lost, Lyn wrote: “Though the pandemic cruelly took away our ability to hug you in your final months and moments, we never stopped thinking about you.”

Oct. 11, 2021

Valerie T. Romero-Lopez

61, Pittsburg

U.S. COVID deaths at the time: 720,572 | California: 72,091 | Bay Area: 6,728

The promise of a vaccine was immense. Even supporters of President Donald Trump in early 2021 cheered and waved Ameri-

‘Without family by his side’

‘Took away our ability to hug you’

‘Even though the vaccine … did not work for her’

PHOTOS BY DAI SUGANO — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Gary Young » Stacey Silva’s arm is tattooed with the dates of the deaths of her parents. Her mother, Melody Young, succumbed to cancer in March 2019 with her daughter by her side.

Gary Young » Stacey Silva sits before a blanket made in memory of her parents at her Gilroy home on May 10, 2022. She is heartbroken that she couldn’t be at the side of her father, Gary Young, who died of COVID-19 during the pandemic’s early days.

Jo-Anne Balistreri » The hands of Jo-Anne Balistreri’s daughters – Suzanne Balistreri, left, Lyn Balistreri, top, and Viana Gerke – touch a portrait of their mother on April 23, 2022, nearly 15 months after her death.

Valerie T. Romero-Lopez » The Romero-Lopez family — husband Daniel Lopez, right; daughters Selena Vasquez, left, and Sabrina Contreras, center; and father Edward Romero — surround a picture of Valerie Romero-Lopez in Pittsburg on April 14, 2022. Valerie died of COVID-19 in October 2021, despite the family’s belief the vaccine would keep her alive.

‘THERE ARE SHARKS HERE ALL THE TIME’

‘God, don’t bite me again’

By Julia Prodis Sulek • jsulek@bayareanewsgroup.com

PACIFIC GROVE

Somehow, he wasn’t desperate for air. He didn’t feel the pain across his abdomen and thighs. He didn’t notice the blood. A strange sense of calm enveloped Steve Bruemmer as he hung weightless underwater and stared into the cold black eye of a great white shark.

Across the street from the beach at Lovers Point, a home security camera captured the signs of the first shark attack here in 70 years. Beyond the cars

NEW HOMES

Bay Area cities may not hit state deadline

Only Alameda has had housing element OK’d ahead of Jan. 31 date

By Ethan Varian evarian@bayareanewsgroup.com

Bay Area cities are running out of time to devise plans for enough new homes to ease the region’s deepening housing crisis — and so far, state officials are sending most of their plans back to the drawing board.

Under state law, local juris-

driving down Ocean View Boulevard and the snack shack selling chocolate-dipped ice cream cones, a giant splash disrupts the water’s flat surface. Then nothing. For 12 seconds.

Just 150 yards from shore, Bruemmer had been finishing up a blissful mile-and-a-half solo swim when an ambush predator charged from below, plowed into Bruemmer midstroke, flipped him over and dragged him under. For 12 seconds, the 62-yearold retired IT worker who volunteered Mondays at the nearby Monterey Bay Aquarium vanished beneath the water.

The shark buoy nearby

The day before, on the first day of summer, a “shark buoy” anchored on the edge of Lovers Point

marine reserve picked up a ping — the first in a month. A great white shark wearing an electronic tag had swum past emitting a signal monitored by a lab at the nearby Hopkins Marine Station and uploaded to a public website.

But Bruemmer, who started ocean swimming 12 years ago with the encouragement of his triathlete wife, Brita, rarely checked the shark buoy pings. He left that to his brother-in-law, George Matsumoto, a biological oceanographer at the aquarium’s research institute in Moss Landing. Every once in a while, Matsumoto would send an email to Bruemmer, who swam with a group called the Kelp Krawlers several days a week at Lovers Point — and sometimes beyond to the shark buoy, a 2-mile round trip.

Vote-by-mail ballots have changed the game

dictions have until Jan. 31 of next year to finalize their socalled housing elements — detailed road maps to meet their dramatically increased statemandated housing goals. Between 2023 and 2031, the entire nine-county region is on the hook for approving over 441,000 new homes for residents of all income levels, more than double the amount for the current eight-year cycle.

As of last week, the California Department of Housing and Community Development

Election patterns and the ‘October Surprise’ will never be the same

By John Woolfolk jwoolfolk@bayareanewsgroup.com

The 2022 election gets official this week as mail ballots go out to every California registered voter by Monday, part of a transformation that has shifted everything about the traditional run-up to Election Day. Campaign ads are hitting the airwaves in midsummer. Election

officials are bracing for the first batch of ballots next week. And the “October Surprise” that once hung over candidates like a possible pox now is a nebulous gamble that may come too early or too late.

Even scheduling debates before voters cast their ballots has become part of California’s election month calculus.

“It’s a whole month of voting,” said Contra Costa County Deputy County Clerk-Recorder Tommy Gong. “It has definitely changed the way elections are happening.”

Two attacks at Lovers Point — the first since 1952 — have a community rethinking the allure of risk

DOUG DURAN — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER; SHARK PHOTO BY ERIC MAILANDER

Steve Bruemmer, who was attacked by a great white shark at Lovers Point in June, is still recovering from the bite that shredded his quadriceps and nearly killed him. He hopes to walk on his own by Christmas. Above right, Bruemmer shows the scars across his legs.

SPORTS: Will Durant come back to the Golden State Warriors? It’s not a pipe dream, says Dieter Kurtenbach. C1

Dining: “Eataly is like a gallery where the producers are the artists.” Epic emporium of restaurants, food counters now open. F1

Abortion ruling’s impact wide

Decision could energize Democratic voters; Republicans likely will steer clear of debate

By Charlie Savage

The New York Times

WASHINGTON » The Supreme Court’s decision Friday to end the constitutional right to abortion concluded one battle for now but immediately posed another far-reaching question: Whether the judicial ground under rights in other personal matters, including contraception and same-sex marriage, is now also shaky.

The lack of a clear and consistent answer among the supermajority of conservative, Republi-

Analysis

can-appointed justices who control the Supreme Court prompted fear on the left, and anticipation among some on the other side of the ideological divide, that the abortion decision could be just the beginning of a sharp rightward shift on issues that directly touch intimate personal choices.

Those reactions were stoked by Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion, in which he explicitly said precedents establishing

ANALYSIS » PAGE 6

By Maggie Angst, Shomik Mukherjee and Kayla Jimenez

Staff writers

While the Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion after almost 50 years does not alter Californians’ access to services, it has quickly become a rallying point for Democratic leaders and progressive activists across the Bay Area looking to energize voters in the months ahead.

Standing in a sea of thousands of residents who gathered in front

of San Jose City Hall on Saturday morning to protest the previous day’s decision, Milpitas City Councilwoman Karina Dominguez called on disheartened residents to make their voices heard.

“I want people to turn that emotion into action,” said Dominguez, clad in a shirt depicting former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face aglow. “I want them to run for office and take up space. But most importantly, hold their elected officials accountable.

“We cannot lose the focus that

Losing Sophia

By Maggie Angst mangst@bayareanewsgroup.com

INSIDE THE BATHROOM of the modest two-story home in north Merced, a tiny, 55-pound body lay decomposing in a tub. The roaring exhaust fan and burned incense failed to mask the putrid smell. ¶ In the backyard, soiled sheets, candy wrappers, and other food packaging littered a locked metal shed — used for punishment, police were later told. The outline of a small handprint blemished a dusty brown nightstand inside.

• • • This is how police found Sophia Mason, an 8-year-old Hayward girl who had lived through so much cruelty in the months before her death but never received the protection she needed from Alameda County’s Department of Children and Family Services. Now, a three-month investigation by the Bay Area News Group is raising critical concerns about the county agency that left Sophia under the care of a mother who had a history of mental illness and neglecting her, until she died.

“It was probably the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in my career,” said Merced police Sgt. Kalvin Haygood of the scene he encountered March 11. “I just can’t begin to imagine what that child went through.

“It really makes you wonder, ‘Where did it all go wrong? Why wasn’t this child protected?’”

That question is far more difficult to answer than it should be. Alameda County is refusing to disclose details of how it handled at least eight separate reports of abuse or neglect involving Sophia, thwarting the intent of a California law written to enable public scrutiny of government agencies charged with keeping children safe.

The county has made only meager disclosures that contain none of the observations or evidence compiled by investigating social workers — material that is regularly released by other California counties under the terms of the law. Nor did it release any reports it should have made to police regarding the suspected abuse of Sophia. Hayward police have said they received no information that warranted their investigation.

“If Alameda County is actually giving you all of

‘It really makes you wonder, “Where did it all go wrong? Why wasn’t this child protected?” ’

Social workers were repeatedly warned about girl’s abuse, but they failed to stop her death

RAY CHAVEZ — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Asia Bracy of San Jose takes part in an abortion rights protest.

— Merced police Sgt. Kalvin Haygood

Roe v. Wade’s reversal poses new questions about how far justices’ reach will extend

COVID-19

Vaccine orders harder to justify

Debate arises over whether it’s time to retire mandates

By John Woolfolk and Elissa Welle Staff writers

The president says the pandemic is over, and mask and social distancing orders have largely ended. But Monica Pirozzoli was disciplined this month and almost lost her job as a Gilroy middle school teacher after 35 years because, though she’s had COVID-19, she hasn’t had the vaccine.

The state just ended its vaccinate-or-test order for schoolteachers, but Gilroy Unified School District is one of many places — federal, state and local governments, schools, colleges and private businesses — where vaccine mandates remain on the books. And that’s raising questions about whether it’s time to retire them, too.

“It makes zero sense at this point,” said Shawna Marino, mother of a sixth grader who has asked Gilroy Unified School District to reconsider its teacher and staff vaccine mandate and helped lead a petition effort to save Pirozzoli’s job. The school board will review the vaccine mandate Oct. 6, and on Friday — af-

ELECTIONS

Housing votes tied to ‘racist’ history

Provision requires approval for projects

By Ethan Varian evarian@ bayareanewsgroup.com

When voters in Oakland, Berkeley and South San Francisco receive ballots in the mail next month, they’ll be asked whether their cities should be allowed to help build more desperately needed affordable housing.

The reason for seeking voters’ permission? A 72-year-old provision in the California Constitution requiring local governments to get community approval before developing, buying or funding “low rent housing” — a law voters across the state will choose whether to repeal in 2024.

Article 34, passed by a statewide ballot initiative in 1950, has blocked af-

By Marisa Kendall mkendall@bayareanewsgroup.com

When Robert Hernandez unpacked his meager belongings into one of San Jose’s celebrated tiny homes, finally getting a bed and access to a shower after more than a decade on the street, he had reason to be elated.

After all, tiny homes have become the hot new thing in the fight to end homelessness. The simple dwellings have multiplied across the Bay Area in the last few years and have been touted in splashy news conferences by everyone from the region’s big city mayors to Gov. Gavin Newsom as a salve to one of California’s thorniest problems.

But even after 55-year-old Hernandez moved into his tiny home on Mabury Road near Coyote Creek, it turned out he still had a long road ahead. For the more than 2,000 people like Hernandez who have tried out the Bay Area’s tiny home experiment, the singlebiggest measure of the model’s success is what happens next: Can

a temporary stay in a tiny home be a final step on the path to permanent housing?

To explore that question, the Bay Area News Group spent four months following several tiny home residents and analyzed three years of data from Santa Clara and Alameda — the counties with the Bay Area’s largest homeless populations and the two that have most fully embraced tiny homes — with the goal of

PHOTOS BY SHAE HAMMOND — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Robert Hernandez exits his trailer at an encampment near Columbus Park in San Jose. He hopes a tiny home will lead to permanent housing.

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Eat Drink Play: Hayward company’s ‘secret sauce’ transforms these Vietnamese recipes. F1

‘Terrifying’ rare winter fire in Big Sur

By Julia Prodis Sulek, Shomik Mukherjee and Jason Green

Sta writers

BIG SUR

» A rare winter wildfire that started near the Big Sur coast burned to the edge of the famed Bixby Bridge early Saturday, closing California’s scenic Highway 1 and forcing people living in rugged back canyons to flee.

The wind-driven Colorado Fire that burned at least 1,500 acres of mostly coastal chaparral had calmed as winds died late Saturday morning, and firefighters had 5% containment as of 5:22 p.m. and continued to dig fire lines to avoid its spread.

Despite dramatic flames that lit up the night sky Friday and a glow

Walk for Life protests abortion

Marchers hope that Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade

By Harriet Blair Rowan and Shomik Mukherjee Sta writers

Thousands of people gathered Saturday at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza and marched to Embarcadero Plaza, protesting abortion on the 49th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, even as a conservative majority on the current court appears poised to reverse it.

They joined tens of thousands of other anti-abortion supporters in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere across

that could be seen for miles, no injuries were reported nor homes burned. Some outbuildings may have been damaged, Big Sur Fire

Chief Matt Harris said Saturday.

“People say, ‘well, it rained,’ but it’s not enough rain,” said Mark Courson from Cal O ce of Emergency Services, who met with Harris on Saturday on the edge of Highway 1. “Throw wind on it, and all bets are o .”

Friday’s fire in the Big Sur region comes less than a month after a devastating wildfire in the state of Colorado burned more than 500 homes, the latest example of what has become a yearround fire season in Western states, driven in part by global warming.

Although Monterey County rainfall is still 118% of average, thanks to rains through December, there has been no measurable rain here in January, according to the National Weather Service. The chaparral on the steep mountainsides of Big Sur dry out quicker than forests and are more susceptible to catch fire, said meteorologist Jan Null of Golden Gate Weather Services.

“Some of it is carryover from the drought of the last two years,” Null said of the fire, “and the ‘flash-burn’ types of fuels that seem to be in this area.”

In the Bay Area, the winds that gusted to 40 mph and spread the Colorado Fire were even stron-

REAL ESTATE

Bay Area homes for sale reach record low

The lack of supply adds to challenges of brutally expensive housing market

By Louis Hansen lhansen@bayareanewsgroup.com

As if it wasn’t hard enough to buy a home in the Bay Area, right now it’s hard to even find a home to buy. The number of houses for sale in December sank to historic

lows, dropping 22% in San Francisco and the East Bay and 32% in the South Bay from the previous year, according to Zillow data.

In recent weeks, only about 700 single-family homes were up for sale in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties — less than half the number of a year ago for a population of nearly 2.7 million people. The East Bay is also pinched.

“It’s been a cold, dry winter,” said David Stark of Bay East Association of Realtors, “for Bay Area

real estate.” Bay Area home inventory has been tight for decades, with home construction lagging far behind the number of new residents migrating to the region for its booming economy and opportunities. The recent dearth of supply has helped to drive home prices to record highs, stoked hot bidding wars across the region, and forced buyers to cross out items on their “must-have” lists or simply give up.

Sellers have been reluctant to list properties for a number of reasons, agents say: pandemic cautions, a reluctance to move and become buyers in a fierce market, or a desire to wait for the value of their home to climb higher. The median price of a single-family home in the nine-county Bay Area hit $1.2 million in December, up 13 percent from the previous year. By normal standards, a threemonth inventory of homes for

PHOTO BY KARL MONDON

One year later, family still healing from horri c crash

SILICON VALLEY

COVID windfall raising alarms

Tech revenues are ‘orders of magnitude’ larger than during the dot-com boom, expert says

By Ethan Baron ebaron@bayareanewsgroup.com

An unprecedented flow of riches is concentrating wealth among Silicon Valley companies that capitalized on the world’s locked-down lives amid the pandemic, raising fears that a dramatically lopsided recovery will warp the economic future for the Bay Area.

Driver to be sentenced in May for DUI collision in Pittsburg that killed 2

By Shomik Mukherjee smukherjee@ bayareanewsgroup.com

ANTIOCH » The message

scrawled in marker on a bright-pink balloon — “Hi Sela, love you and miss you so much” — slowly faded from sight as it floated up into the clear sky above Holy Cross Cemetery.

It joined dozens of other candy-colored balloons carrying poignant messages memorializing 7-year-old Sela Mataele and her closest father figure, Ramiro Castro, who were killed in a horrific crash one year ago on April 12, 2021, at the hands of a repeat drunken driver.

While friends and family who gathered for the occasion on Tuesday all looked up, Sela’s mother, Corrina Rosalez, turned away. She stared hard at the ground, wiping her eyes so her two boys — who along with her were badly injured in the same crash — wouldn’t notice the tears.

It’s been an agonizing year for Rosalez, who’s had to put aside her grief to pay o mounting medical bills from the collision, relive the trauma by attending the court appearances of the driver who crashed

PANDEMIC

into her family’s Corolla, and help her two sons try to cope with the tragedy.

“People tell me I’m strong, but I don’t feel it,” she said at the memorial gathering, sitting on the grass in front of Sela and Castro’s burial plots.

“I’m just not ready to deal with it, with any of it,” she said. “I’m emotionally not there right now. I know I’m here physically, but I guess I’ve torn myself away from

a lot of people. And I don’t like hearing that it’s going to be OK.” Rosalez can’t control the occasional memory flashes of that fateful day. They might strike when she’s sitting alone in tra c, or when her phone sends a random photo memory of a grinning Sela to the lock screen. That’s when images of the crash come flooding back. She was falling asleep in the passenger seat that eve -

ning last April while Castro, her boyfriend of five years, drove the family home from dinner at Golden Corral Buffet & Grill in Concord.

Sela, Nicholas and Julian (then 7, 5 and 2) were settling down from a sugar rush in the back seat as the family’s Corolla coasted down West Leland Street toward John Henry Johnson Park in Pittsburg.

Suddenly, a speeding Ca-

Air travel costs surge, with more to come

Domestic ights are up 40% in 2022, another 10% increase projected

By Eliyahu Kamisher ekamisher@ bayareanewsgroup.com

Patrick De Haan has a bird’seye view of skyrocketing prices around the country. He’s the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, a company that crowdsources gas price data. But more recently, he is feeling the pain of emptying his wallet for one of the latest trends of surging costs — air travel.

“My wife and I booked two trips to Rio last year,” De Haan

said. “Now I’m spending 20% more just to get to Atlanta than we spent to go to Brazil.”

But it’s bad news beyond De Haan’s household budget. Many travelers used to scoring pandemic flight deals are in for an unpleasant surprise as the tides of cheap air travel have shifted.

According to Hopper, a flightbook app, the cost of domestic air travel is up 40% since the start of the year, with the average roundtrip flight at $330. The company expects prices to rise 10% in May. Multiple air travel experts say the worst is still to come. After two years of COVID-19 crushing our travel plans, consumer demand is now high despite increas-

ing prices just as the cost of jet fuel has ballooned due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And that’s a double whammy on fares.

“People see an opportunity where they can book summer travel as (COVID-19) cases seem down. So it’s really propelling this desire to travel,” said Vivek Pan dya, a lead analyst for Adobe Dig ital Insights, which compiles air travel data.

The era of cheap prices o cially ended in February when domestic air travel fares finally topped pre-pandemic costs, Pan dya said.

Airlines are also seeing trouble keeping the planes flying o the tarmac due to pilot shortages

“Any time you have a jolt to the economy … those that have the ability to most benefit from that will benefit handsomely,” said San Jose Chamber of Commerce CEO Derrick Seaver. “We have a particular focus on making sure that the businesses that were on the negative end of the last two years are given a fair playing field to recover.”

Apple’s revenue skyrocketed to a record $366 billion last year, from $275 billion in 2020 as the virus began wreaking havoc, and from $260 billion in 2019 before the pandemic, propelled by device sales and services to people suddenly living through screens. Google’s 2021 take leaped to a record $258 billion from $183 billion in 2020 and $162 billion in 2019. And Facebook’s income surged to a record $118 billion from $86 billion in 2020 and $71 billion in 2019, as advertisers

» PAGE 6

SEEKING CHANGE

Why are so many school board recall e orts petering out?

By Grace Hase ghase@bayareanewsgroup.com

Following a year of recall fever that thrust California into the national spotlight with attempts to remove Gov. Gavin Newsom and other elected leaders, a similar trend is sweeping school boards across the state.

Though most attempts fizzled at a much higher rate than before the pandemic, state lawmakers now want to make it tougher to initiate recalls, which currently require just 10 signatures to start the ball rolling.

Assembly member Marc Berman, D-Menlo Park, likens the low threshold to an “angry person going to the bar with his buddies and passing” around a form for them to sign.

RECALLS » PAGE 6

PHOTOS BY NHAT V. MEYER — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Family and friends release balloons on the one-year anniversary of the deaths of 7-year-old Sela Mataele and her mother’s partner, Ramiro Castro, at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Antioch on Tuesday.

Corrina Rosalez sits at the gravesite of daughter Sela Mataele and partner Ramiro Castro, at the Holy Cross Cemetery. Both were killed by a drunk driver a year ago in Pittsburg.

Encampment residents decry lack of aid

As deadline to vacate nears, $250K for relocation tied up in red tape

By Marisa Kendall mkendall@bayareanewsgroup.com

RICHMOND

» With a deadline fast approaching to clear a long-standing Richmond homeless encampment, residents say the city hasn’t kept its promise to help them find new places to live — even though the City Council allocated $250,000 to the task.

More than two dozen people

THAT’S ONE COOL HORSE

living in a close-knit community of RVs and trailers along Rydin Road, near the entrance to the Point Isabel Regional Shoreline, have been given until Sept. 30 to pack up and leave. It’s the latest high-profile encampment to face closure in recent weeks as Bay Area cities ramp up enforcement, dispersing camps that have grown in size since the COVID-19 shelterin-place orders.

But as is the case in many encampment cleanup efforts throughout the region, residents of Rydin Road say they have no other options. “They’re evicting us in two weeks without any help. Without any place to go,” said 52-year-old Jessi Taran, who has been sleeping in a bus on Rydin Road, living o her savings, since she was

Rain cools the crowds at El Sobrante Stroll parade

Residents Rain Citro, le , and Iris Bendahan share a moment together during a press conference at a homeless encampment on Rydin Road in Richmond on Thursday. JANE

ELECTION 2022

By-district balloting for council jobs arrives

2 planning commissioners among 3 candidates for seats on Oakley panel

By Judith Prieve jprieve@bayareanewsgroup.com

OAKLEY » With only three candidates running for o ce, including one running unopposed, it’s shaping up to be a quiet City Council race for two seats this year in Oakley.

This will be the first time residents will cast their votes in district elections after having switched from at-large elections in 2021. Two of the seats are up for election in November.

By the filing deadline, only one candidate had qualified for District 4. The council could have appointed a new member, but instead agreed to hold an election, giving write-in candidates a chance to enter the race.

Shannon Shaw, a property manager for a senior community, was the only candidate to qualify for District 4, while Hugh Henderson and Rachelle “Shelly” Fitzgerald both qualified in the District 2 race. Shaw is the chairman of the Planning Commission and Henderson is a member.

ABOVE: Wearing sunglasses despite the rain, Black Diamond, owned by Scott Johnson of Orinda, stops to glance back at the crowd while participating in the 27th annual El Sobrante Stroll parade in El Sobrante on Sunday.

LEFT: El Sobrante Citizen of the Year Dorcas Moulton, le , and El Sobrante Chamber of Commerce President Nicole Donn, right, sport colorful umbrellas while waving to the crowd during the El Sobrante Stroll.

Fitzgerald, 51, is running for public o ce for the first time, having immersed herself in politics last year, opposing a new McDonald’s and Quick Quack car wash. She said she didn’t want to compromise children’s health and safety by flooding the nearby school zone with junk food, traffic congestion and alcohol/tobacco outlets.

“Seeing how the city operates and working tirelessly to have our voices heard inspired me to be on the other side to actually hear the

190,000 PEOPLE

State to give $2,500 education grants to workers who lost jobs during the coronavirus pandemic

By Mikhail Zinshteyn

CalMatters

Living through a pandemic sucks, but for Diana McLaughlin, early 2020 was especially bad: A divorce in February 2020, societal shutdown in March and as part of the COVID-19 economic fallout she lost her job in April of that year, returning to full-time work only 18 months later.

California lawmakers had economically distressed folks like McLaughlin in mind when last year they approved half a billion dollars on education grants worth $2,500 to help workers displaced by the pandemic acquire new job-related skills.

McLaughlin is among the first 3,000 or so recipients of this grant, adult learners who were issued checks in a pilot program this spring and summer. Now the state is opening the grant to a wide range of adults

with low incomes who lost their jobs or saw their hours severely cut during the pandemic. Half of the grant funds are reserved for displaced workers with children under 18.

Officials expect to reach 190,000 people with this money, called the Golden State Education and Training Grant Program. Applicants must fill out a

DANVILLE O cials: 2nd student alleges molestation by cheer coach

By Nate Gartrell ngartrell@bayareanewsgroup.com

short application that takes about 10 minutes to complete and attest that they lost a job or hours after March 4, 2020. There’s an income threshold as well.

Part of what makes the application quick to complete is how little it asks. Unlike other grant applications for college, this one is self-reported and self-certified, wrote Judith Gutierrez, spokesperson for the state financial aid agency running the grant, in an email. “We are not requesting any documentation,” she added.

McLaughlin wasted no time once she received her grant in June 2022. After taking courses part time at American River College, a community college in Sacramento, since October 2020, she decided to go full time to pursue her first ever-degree this fall and chose accounting as her major.

DANVILLE » Contra Costa pros -

ecutors announced that they’ve filed three felony charges against a Concord man who worked as a Danville middle school teacher and a cheerleading coach, after identifying two students as victims.

Nicholas Moseby, 41, was charged with molesting two girls, aged 13 and 15, as well as sending obscene material to one of them. He remains in custody in lieu of $200,000 bail, court records show.

Moseby was arrested last week after one of the girls reported that he’d allegedly sent her a video of himself masturbating, after adding her on Snapchat. During a police interview she told an investigator he inappropriately touched her during a cheerleading session, authorities said.

The second alleged victim was identified after reports of Moseby’s arrest became public. Police

PHOTOS BY JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

FRED GREAVES — CALMATTERS

Diana McLaughlin, here in Citrus Heights on Sept. 9, is among the rst recipients of an education grant worth $2,500 to help workers displaced by the pandemic.

Teachers union threatens strike over COVID

Oakland Educators Association has given the district 48 hours from Wednesday to come to an agreement about a virus safety plan

MR. ROADSHOW

By Summer Lin slin@bayareanewsgroup.com

OAKLAND » The president of Oakland Unified School District’s teachers union has given the district 48 hours to come to an agreement about an updated COVID-19 safety plan for schools across the district, saying that without an agreement the union will vote on whether to strike.

In an email to union members, Oakland Educators Association President Keith Brown said that 72% of OEA members voted yes to participate in a strike if their bargaining demands aren’t met.

Tra c’s still a bummer — pandemic has made it worse

QA question for the tra c guru. How do the MTC and Caltrans think they are helping motorists with their commutes and vehicle exhaust when they steal a lane on the Nimitz Freeway between Fremont and Oakland for a socalled toll lane, which leaves one less lane? Tra c is now stop and go, pretty much from 7 a.m to 6 p.m. all day long. How is that e cient for the average commuter?

— Herman Betchart, Fremont

AExpress lanes on Interstate 880 and elsewhere have not resulted in much tra c flow improvement yet, but the goal is to provide incentives for solo drivers to find or create car pools to cut tra c. That’s why two people carpooling get a toll discount and three people in one car ride free in that lane. We won’t be able to fully assess the situation until the pandemic is over.

QHas there been any thought by San Francisco to make its downtown streets alternating one-way boulevards to

UNION CITY

“Tonight, the OEA Executive Board voted to empower me to proceed with an all-member formal strike authorization vote in the event that OUSD does not reach an agreement with us in the next 48 hours,” Brown wrote Wednesday night.

Brown said the OEA’s core demands include weekly testing at all schools, high-quality masks for all students and sta and to address the sta ng shortage at schools by “making sure there’s an adult covering every classroom vacancy.”

Brown said that though the OEA originally asked for weekly testing in its proposal, the school board

changed it to biweekly testing in an amended resolution passed during the fall.

“The progress was slow,” he said.

“The district did not have a sense of urgency around the negotiations, and it’s unfortunate that it took an omicron surge and it took student protests and grassroots teacher activism to push the district to meet with us and also bring an agreement around COVID leave.”

District spokesperson John Sasaki said the district reached an agreement with OEA in July for safety measures for the school year, including protective equipment, ventilation, testing, contact tracing

and other protocols. Sasaki added that meetings have been scheduled with the union. “Despite the challenges we are all facing, we are very hopeful that the district and OEA will yet again find a way to reach an agreement,” he said.

Montera Middle School math teacher Quinn Ranahan, who was on the safety bargaining team for the OEA until December, said the union has been trying to negotiate with the district since August for better COVID-19 measures, including weekly testing, air filtration, masks, nutrition breaks and outdoor eating spaces. Since then, she

TOWERING ABOVE THE CLOUDS

Thursday morning.

Sewer district to get $250 million federal loan for upgrades

By Joseph Geha jgeha@bayareanewsgroup.com

UNION CITY

» The Union Sanitary District will receive a $250 million federal infrastructure loan to upgrade its aging waste treatment facility.

The cash infusion will help support the district’s roughly $510 million plan to significantly upgrade its 33-acre wastewater treatment facility in Union City, the largest improvement project it has ever undertaken. The project will take an estimated seven to 10 years to complete, o cials said.

Aging equipment, including massive aeration tanks and clarifiers that treat wastewa -

Employee at Tesla factory in Fremont dies while working on production line

By Joseph Geha jgeha@bayareanewsgroup.com

»

FREMONT

ter in stages, will be replaced. New infrastructure will be installed to help the facility remove about half of all nitrogen in wastewater, as well as up to 90% of ammonia before it is pumped back into the bay, easing the district’s impact on local waters.

“We are happy to support Union Sanitary District and their project, which will help protect our cherished San Francisco Bay,” Martha Guzman, the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest, said in a statement.

Guzman announced the loan Wednesday in a news conference with local and state ocials. The loan is overseen by the EPA and made possible by the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act of

An employee at the Tesla factory in Fremont died early Wednesday while working on a production line, and health and safety o cials are looking into the cause of the death.

The worker collapsed while working on the powertrain line at the factory, according to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or Cal/OSHA. The agency said Tesla notified state o cials of the death.

“Cal/OSHA is gathering more information to determine the work-relatedness of this event and whether to conduct an inspection,” the agency said in an emailed statement Thursday morning. Around 5:38 a.m. Wednesday, Fremont Fire Department crews responded to a report of a medical emergency at the

factory. While firefighters were headed to the factory, the call was upgraded to a rescue, after dispatchers received more information about a man possibly trapped in machinery at the factory, according to Aisha Knowles, a spokesperson for

the Fire Department.

However, the first firefighters to arrive “updated the response to a medical emergency and said there was no machinery involved,” and additional crews responding as part of the

SAN FRANCISCO BAY

KARL MONDON — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The Transamerica Pyramid pokes through thick fog blanketing the San Francisco Bay to catch the rst rays of sunlight on