The allegations were contained in a complaint by whistleblower Sarah Dunbar-Riley, a Nutrition Services supervisor, to interim Superintendent Judy White after the district reopened an investigation that originally was launched in 2023 but then abruptly halted.

In her four-page statement to White dated March 19, Dunbar-Riley alleges Nutrition Services Lead Agent Fausat Rahman-Davies repeatedly misused government food commodities and district central kitchen supplies. She also implicated Assistant Agent Maria Rangel and former Program Innovator Kristina Kraushaar in the activities.

Rahman-Davies “regularly loaded her van — or Kristina Kraushaar, and Maria Rangel’s vehicles — with large quantities of fresh produce, baked goods, and other over-ordered items to donate to her mosque and personal home supply,” Dunbar-Riley said in her statement, a copy of which was obtained by the Southern California News Group.

Dunbar-Riley alleged that Rahman-Davies engaged in the conduct on a weekly basis for at least five years — from the time she was appointed lead agent in 2019 through 2024.

Excess food restrictions

Government food commodities from the U.S. Department of Agriculture support student lunch and breakfast, summer meal, after-school snack and supper programs at school districts across the nation, according to the California Department of Education. Over-ordered food cannot be used for fundraisers, community events or a la carte sales, nor can it be given away to employees, friends or family members.

However, it can be transferred to other schools and districts for use. Unused food also can be donated to other organizations, including food banks, pantries and homeless shelters, under certain safety guidelines. In worst-case scenarios, when the food cannot be used or reallocated or is spoiled, it must be disposed of or destroyed according to state and federal guidelines.

Officials with the California School Nutrition Association did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Drive-up service

Dunbar-Riley and other Nutrition Services employees who spoke to the Southern California News Group on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal said that, on multiple occasions, they saw boxes of food carted out of the central kitchen warehouse on dollies and into the parking lot, where warehouse workers and other employees — at the instruction of Rahman-Davies, Kraushaar or Rangel — would load the food into personal vehicles.

Among the regulars who showed up for food, they said, was Maria Montes Torres, mother of school board member Edgar Montes and a former Nutrition Services employee who resigned on April 16 following a Southern California News Group inquiry about her son voting to hire her as a part-time cafeteria worker in August 2022, a violation of the board’s conflict of interest bylaws.

In her statement, Dunbar-Riley said Rangel would call Montes Torres often to come pick up food, citing specific dates of Aug. 25 and Sept. 28 of 2020 as examples.

Edgar Montes did not respond to a request for comment.

Dunbar-Riley also alleges another school board member was among those showing up often at the central kitchen to pick up food.

“Board member Evelyn Dominguez had her car loaded with food on multiple occasions; one occurrence was on April 28th, 2023,” Dunbar-Riley said in her statement.

Dominguez declined to comment.

Food routinely over-ordered

One Nutrition Services employee of 15 years said Rangel and Kraushaar would regularly instruct employees to prepare boxes of fresh produce and other government-issued food to give away to people who clearly were not supposed to be receiving it.

“The difference was the people in the suits and ties. You could tell they were people that didn’t need the food,” the employee said, adding that the conduct never occurred when Cindy Stone, Rahman-Davies’ predecessor, headed the department. “Ever since she (Rahman-Davies) started, that’s when it all started,” the employee said.

The employee said food was consistently over-ordered by Rahman-Davies, Kraushaar and Rangel — to the tune of about $30,000 a month, leaving the district with so much unused food that much of it was thrown away.

“We would trash pallets of apples, oranges, all kinds of mixed fruit. We threw so much food away,” said the employee, who believes food was over-ordered to bolster the amount of funding the department would receive annually from state and federal programs.

Dunbar-Riley said over-ordered food also was used at special events for which it was not intended, including annual Black History Month celebrations hosted by Nutrition Services, food pantry giveaways, and a district literacy and numeracy fair in 2023.

Another Nutrition Services employee also attested to seeing Rahman-Davies and Rangel loading food into their van or SUV on multiple occasions and thought it odd, given the department has its own vans to transport food.

“I’m like, ‘What are they doing? Where are they going? It’s government food. Why would they be putting it into their own car?’ ” the employee said. “That shouldn’t be done. It was a red flag.”

The employee also said that, on multiple occasions, Rahman-Davies’ sister also benefited from excess food.

“She would sit with Fausat in her office and, after a few minutes, there would be boxes of food waiting for her that were loaded into her car,” the employee said.

Rahman-Davies and Krausher did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Reached by telephone, Rangel declined to comment.

Initial probe halted

Dunbar-Riley’s allegations surfaced during an investigation by the Southern California News Group into the Nutrition Services department that began in December 2024. White, the interim superintendent, confirmed in early March — about a week after the school board appointed her to the temporary post — that she reopened an investigation into the alleged inflation of student meal counts that was paused last year shortly after Superintendent Cuauhtemoc Avila was abruptly placed on leave on May 8, 2024.

Ten months later, Avila was fired without cause amid sexual harassment allegations against him that he claims were trumped up.

White placed Rahman-Davies and Rangel on paid administrative leave when she revived the investigation. Kraushaar left the district in February to take a job as food services director for the Chaffey Joint Union High School District.

No criminal charges have been filed in connection with the allegations, and, thus far, there is no indication that any outside authorities are investigating them.

However, Rialto Unified spokesperson Syeda Jafri confirmed that the district is conducting a forensic audit of the meal inflation allegations as well as investigating complaints about employee mistreatment in the Nutrition Services department and “all allegations of misappropriation of food.”

Under a settlement agreement unanimously approved by the school board on April 22, Sabine Robertson-Phillips will remain on paid leave — at a salary of about $25,000 a month — from now until Sept. 1. At that point, her resignation will take effect and she will retire.

She then will receive a lump sum check equivalent to 10 months’ pay — about $260,000 — to cover her compensation through the remaining term of her employment contract, which ends on June 30, 2026. Robertson-Phillips also will be able to cash out 44 days of accrued vacation and be eligible to receive retiree medical benefits.

Placed on leave

Robertson-Phillips, 54, was placed on paid leave on April 25, 2024 — the same day the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released a damning 20-page letter to Superintendent Juan Cabral with its findings from a four-year investigation, which concluded that the district, among other things, failed to respond properly to 74% of 35 reports of sexual abuse against students from 2017 to 2020.

According to the OCR’s letter, the district’s boundaries policy calls for school supervisors and the “assigned human resources administrator” to promptly investigate possible violations of sexual misconduct involving staff and students.

Scapegoating alleged

In a claim filed against the district in September, Robertson-Phillips, who has collected about $330,000 in pay from the district since she was placed on leave, alleged Redlands Unified scapegoated her and tried to fire her following the federal probe and a parallel investigation by the state Department of Justice, which released its own report a month after the OCR’s. The DOJ concluded that the district “systemically violated laws in place to protect students against and address complaints related to sexual assault, harassment and abuse.”

Robertson-Phillips alleged in her claim that the district breached the terms of its employment contract with her, and that she was never found culpable of any wrongdoing, nor had she received any negative performance evaluations in her 17 years as HR director.

The district commissioned an administrative investigation into Robertson-Phillips during her leave, but it produced no findings of misconduct, according to the settlement agreement. However, the district and Robertson-Phillips reached an impasse and decided to part ways.

“An employment dispute has arisen between the parties. No findings of misconduct were made following the district’s review of the matter. Nevertheless, the employee and employer believe it is in their respective best interests to sever the employment relationship,” according to the agreement.

No admission of wrongdoing

Per the agreement, the district will further sweeten the pot for Robertson-Phillips by paying her $150,000 to settle her claim, typically a precursor to a lawsuit. The payment will be made on June 30, 2026, when the term of Robertson-Phillips’ employment contract ends.

The terms of the settlement agreement are not an “admission or finding of liability, misconduct, or wrongdoing by either employer or employee.”

Robertson-Phillips, who began her career at Redlands Unified in 1995 as a fifth-grade teacher at Crafton Elementary School, has served as the district’s assistant superintendent of human resources since 2007.

Stephen Larson, Robertson-Phillips’ attorney, said she agreed to settle her legal claims in exchange for the district paying her everything owed under her contract plus an additional severance amount.

“This resolution, in which the district explicitly acknowledged it had not found any misconduct by Dr. Robertson-Phillips, allows her to focus on the next phase of her life, retiring effective September 1, 2025, after over 30 years of exemplary service to the district,” Larson said in a statement.

The district declined to comment.

Lisa Nakamura-Bruich has been serving as the acting assistant superintendent of human resources since Oct. 9, district spokesperson Christine Stephens said.

SCNG investigation

The OCR and DOJ investigations, which began in 2020 and 2022, respectively, followed a more than yearlong investigation by the Southern California News Group that began in 2018 and revealed that the district, for decades, frequently failed to report to authorities teachers and other employees accused of grooming and sexually abusing students.

Robertson-Phillips became a focal point of the investigation when it was revealed she allegedly obstructed a police raid at the district office in July 2013 during the investigation of former Citrus Valley High School teacher Laura Whitehurst. The two lead investigators in the case testified in sworn depositions that Robertson-Phillips was caught in her office deleting files from her computer and instructed staff not to cooperate with police, and to lawyer up if approached by detectives.

Robertson-Phillips denied the allegations, saying in an email to the Southern California News Group in 2018 she had a “proven track record of working collaboratively with the police on cases” throughout her tenure as assistant superintendent.

Whitehurst, who became impregnated by one of her victims and bore his child, pleaded guilty to six felony counts associated with three victims following her July 2013 arrest. She served six months in jail and registered as a sex offender.

Robertson-Phillips also had been aware of inappropriate conduct involving former Redlands High School special education teacher and golf coach Kevin Patrick Kirkland, who preyed on vulnerable female students for more than three years and groomed them for sex.

She twice admonished Kirkland about his conduct. The first was in June 2012, when she gave him a four-page notice of unprofessional conduct citing six incidents of Kirkland sending inappropriate text messages to his classroom aide, who subsequently reported Kirkland to school administrators, according to internal school district records, police reports and sworn depositions.

And in May 2015, Robertson-Phillips admonished Kirkland again after a parent complained he was having a “special relationship” with a student and was seen off campus with two female students buying ice cream. Robertson-Phillips warned Kirkland it was “absolutely vital” that he “maintain proper teacher-student boundaries at all times.”

None of the incidents, however, involved alleged sexual misconduct, only inappropriate teacher-student boundary violations. But student and parent complaints about Kirkland’s inappropriate conduct involving female students dated as far back as 2006 or 2007, the SCNG investigation found.

In December 2018, the district announced it was adopting sweeping reforms and implemented its ACT (Actions Create Trust) Now initiative that included 10 measures to enhance student safety and raise awareness with employees. Three years later, in 2021, the district touted those reforms as paying off.

Reports of the district’s lapses in reporting and thwarting student sexual abuse also prompted a probe by the San Bernardino County civil grand jury, which released a report in the spring of 2022 concluding that, despite the district’s best efforts, many employees were still vague on state-mandated reporter laws and did not have a clear understanding of “reasonable suspicion” — information rising to the level that it warrants reporting suspected abuse to law enforcement or the Department of Children and Family Services.

Morgan Stewart, an attorney for the Irvine law firm Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, which since 2016 has collected $45.5 million from Redlands Unified to settle lawsuits by former students claiming they were sexually abused, has long called for Robertson-Phillips’ resignation.

Though he was pleased about her resignation, Stewart was not content with the assertion she committed no wrongdoing.

“I think the testimony from the police department was pretty clear that she was culpable in covering up sexual abuse. And the findings from the Department of Justice and Office for Civil Rights investigations further confirm that,” Stewart said. “Those investigations support the conclusion that Redlands Unified has covered up and protected sexual abusers on its campuses going back 20-plus years.”

Christopher Damien reported about law enforcement in Southern California’s inland and desert communities as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

As two cellmates were fighting in a Riverside County jail, an inexperienced guard remotely opened the cell door, a violation of safety protocols. One of the men immediately pulled out the other, hoisted him over his shoulder and threw him over a catwalk railing. He fell 15 feet before smashing into a metal table. It was his first day in the jail and his last day of life.

At another county jail, a detainee who had been mentally ill and charged with child sexual abuse should have been segregated for his own safety. Instead, he was placed in a bunk room with about 15 other men where he was strangled.

When a guard started a security check more than 90 minutes late at another county site, blood was pooling under a cell door and a detainee was wiping the walls. Inside, the officer found the man’s cellmate beaten, stabbed and without a pulse.

Killings are relatively rare in American jails, but those in Riverside County experienced a surge in them. They had the highest homicide rate among large jails in California from 2020 through 2023, according to state data. The murders and other deaths made the county’s five jails the second-deadliest in the nation during that period. In 2022, the jail system’s worst year, 19 detainees would die from homicides, suicides, overdoses and natural causes.

There were clear patterns of security lapses, negligence and policy violations that contributed to the six homicides in the county jails from 2020 through last year, The New York Times and The Desert Sun found. Similar issues were factors in the other deaths from this time period, previous reporting shows.

An examination of the killings revealed that more than half the guards at one jail were performing security checks far less frequently than required, and often one to two hours late. They also failed to act during the fatal attacks or suspicious activity related to them caught on surveillance cameras, which are supposed to be constantly monitored.

In four homicides, detainees were assigned to cells that put them at greater risk, contrary to standard practices of separating detainees by race, sexual orientation and other factors, including a history of violent crimes, that could stoke conflict.

When deaths occurred, subsequent investigations were often flawed. Internal and public reports about the killings from the Sheriff’s Department established inaccurate timelines, omitted relevant facts and sometimes added false information, including a security check that never happened. Such reports had the effect of concealing from the public and detainees’ families consequential failures and decisions.

This article draws on more than 75 department reports, photos and videos of the deaths, internal documents detailing jail staffing and interviews with current and former employees.

The Riverside County sheriff, Chad Bianco, who took office in 2018 and was reelected four years later, implemented substantial staffing changes over that period, significantly reducing training requirements for guards. He declined to comment for this article or respond to questions. The union representing guards in the county jails also did not respond to requests for comment.

Bianco, a vocal Trump partisan, is now campaigning to win the Republican nomination for California governor. He has regularly bashed Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and put blame for the jail deaths on the state’s left-leaning legislators.

But as the body count has risen, so has scrutiny of his department. The California Department of Justice has been conducting a civil rights investigation, and more than a dozen lawsuits making wrongful death claims have been filed against Riverside County, which has paid more than $13.3 million in settlements.

The morning after a detainee killing in September 2022 at the county jail in Murrieta, an administrator told sergeants to audit video to ensure that security checks were adhering to state law.

What was at stake, Lt. Aaron Martin wrote in an email obtained by The New York Times and The Desert Sun, was the threat of civil litigation.

“Due to the recent overdoses and deaths, it is important for you to understand how to properly conduct and document security checks to protect yourself and the Department from liability issues,” the email began. “Whenever these catastrophic situations occur, security checks are heavily scrutinized.”

Little training, big consequences

Hours before he was thrown from the Murrieta jail’s second floor, Mark Spratt, 24, had been charged with fraud after he was caught with stolen debit cards. He had several convictions for vehicle theft in neighboring San Bernardino County, but his crimes involved nothing like the violence he would fall victim to.

He was placed in a cell with Micky Payne, 35, who had three previous felony convictions, one for trying to take a gun from a police officer and two for domestic violence. In January 2023, he was awaiting sentencing for attacking a man with a broken bottle.

Payne was an admitted gang member and had recently fought with a cellmate, said Brynna Popka, a lawyer representing Spratt’s family. On the day Payne was sentenced to two years in state prison, Spratt was sent to share his cell.

From the start, there was trouble. Surveillance footage shows Payne blocked entry to the cell in a brief standoff. (The Sheriff’s Department has not publicly released the video.) Payne, who is Black, later complained on a phone call that a White man had been put in his cell, according to a department report.

Five current and former jail supervisors said that Payne’s altercation with his previous cellmate, along with the bottle attack, should have triggered a behavioral health assessment or the more restrictive custody often used for dangerous detainees. Along with the racial issues, the disparity in the men’s records — violent crimes versus small-scale fraud — should have led the jail to classify them differently and not pair them up, according to the veteran employees. (They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.)

At the time, there was upheaval in the Riverside jails.

The department had long required deputies to start their careers in the jail system. But many objected. Sheriff Bianco promised to do away with jail assignments during his campaign in 2018. In 2022, as the nation began to emerge from the pandemic, he was eager to deliver.

He increased the number of jail staff and leadership positions that would be filled by correctional deputies. They are paid significantly less than deputy sheriffs, can start at age 18 instead of 21 and complete training in less than three months rather than six.

That change drained critical experience and training from the jails, according to the five veteran employees. The surge in violence and detainee deaths that followed, they said, was a consequence.

Internal emails obtained by The New York Times and The Desert Sun included spreadsheets tracking the shifts in jail staffing. The number of sworn deputies dropped from about 180 in March 2022 to 65 by the following November. The first of the 19 deaths came in April that year.

Michael Lujan, who had retired as a sheriff’s captain before he challenged Bianco in the 2022 election, said it was invaluable to have experienced jail workers at all levels who know how to effectively communicate with people in custody, and to make sound decisions when situations become volatile.

“I’m not casting blame on the hardworking young people in these difficult assignments,” Lujan said in an interview. “It was a managerial error to move veteran workers out of the jails and create an experience deficiency that builds on itself.”

While the county jails had, on average, a killing every two years during the last two decades, three homicides occurred at the Murrieta jail over just four months.

Spratt’s was one of them. In Cell 43, he appeared to be asleep when deputies did a security check just after midnight on Jan. 12, 2023. But about 1:30 a.m., neighboring detainees alerted deputies that a fight had broken out inside.

Correctional Deputy Nicolas Sevilla, who had finished training just six months earlier, did not intervene, however. When told of the conflict, he didn’t leave his post in the central control room — about 50 feet away — but turned on the lights and told the two men over the intercom to stop fighting, according to a department report.

Minutes later, he remotely unlocked and opened the door to the cell, the report said.

That was highly unusual. Several of the former supervisors said it was typical practice for deputies to alert other guards, go outside the cell where a fight was occurring, try to de-escalate verbally, then use pepper spray or another deterrent. Opening the door, they added, created a chaotic, dangerous situation.

Spratt was on the floor of the cell. Payne then dragged him, exited the cell and threw him over the nearby handrail, according to the report and video images from the subsequent criminal case.

Doctors at a nearby medical center found that Spratt had sustained facial fractures, a broken leg and spine and a torn aorta. He underwent emergency surgery but did not survive.

In later commenting on the death, Bianco falsely claimed that Spratt had a history of violent crime and that the two detainees had gotten along as cellmates for three months. The jail system, in reporting the death to the California Department of Justice, wrote that Spratt was Black, while the autopsy report — and his own family — said he was White.

Fatal errors

The placement of detainees contributed to other killings at the Riverside County jails. It’s standard at jails around the country to house detainees according to demographics, gang affiliations, records of violence and any medical and behavioral health issues. While strict segregation isn’t always necessary or possible, these factors typically are carefully considered.

“If you are following your training and guidelines, you should be able to effectively reduce the risk of this kind of violence,” Lujan, the former captain, said of the homicides. “Think of the thousands of people who have cycled through the jails in years past without a problem here and in other counties.”

Scott Lowder, 55, for example, had previous convictions for violent crimes and had been incarcerated since May 2024 for threatening to kill a gas station attendant with a knife. Two current and former jail employees said that Lowder was incorrectly classified when he was booked. Despite his record, he was permitted access to tools in the print shop at the jail in Banning during a vocational program for low-risk defendants. On Sept. 7 last year, while a teacher was present without any guards, he stabbed Steve Deleon Gonzalez, 36, another detainee, with a screwdriver. The victim later died from the wound.

Rosendo Echevarria, 29, was held at the same jail after returning from treatment to improve his mental competency so he could stand trial. His mental health issues and the crimes he was accused of — child sexual assaults — made him a target in a barrack-like unit with about 15 other detainees.

On Sept. 8, 2020, three days after his arrival, three of them strangled him while others played cards and chess nearby, video images show. One man convicted in the killing later told a reporter that deputies had told some of the detainees to check out the charges against Echevarria.

At the Murrieta jail, Kaushal Niroula, 41, was awaiting retrial on homicide charges in the 2008 killing, with five others, of an art collector in Palm Springs whom they had intended to defraud. Niroula, who had been transitioning to female while in custody and had H.I.V., should have been considered for segregation for her own safety, according to jail policies.

Instead, she was housed with Rodney Sanchez, 63, a man accused of several violent child sexual assaults. After six months sharing a cell, he strangled her on Sept. 6, 2022.

He later pleaded guilty and told detectives he had been annoyed by Niroula’s talk of possible release after an upcoming trial. At that point, he had been jailed more than six years.

Violence can break out at any point when people are incarcerated, but long stays in jails and prisons can be associated with more conflict and attacks. The Riverside County jails tend to hold people longer than those in most other California counties.

Sheriff Bianco and District Attorney Mike Hestrin both tout their tough-on-crime stances. Many suspects are kept in jail for long periods awaiting trial because the prosecutors’ office offers plea bargains far less often than its counterparts in the state. That leads to packing the jails and backlogs in the courts.

Riverside County’s share of the jail population awaiting resolution of a felony case rose from 59% to 86% between 2015 and 2024, data shows. That is one of the highest rates in the state.

In the jail killings, some victims and their attackers had been held for long periods. Niroula had been incarcerated for nearly 12 years, with a stint in state prison. Echevarria had been in custody for seven years. The three men accused of strangling him had collectively spent more than seven years in jail before the attack.

A lack of accountability

When a detainee is killed, the Sheriff’s Department initiates a series of inquiries that are essential to criminal prosecutions and internal assessments.

But reports of those investigations in Riverside County are often marked by errors and omissions, The New York Times and The Desert Sun found. In some cases, the reports appeared to cover up serious security lapses.

The flaws were particularly striking in reports about the death of Ulysses Munoz Ayala, 39, held on an assault charge, at the Murrieta jail on Sept. 29, 2022.

Just three weeks after Niroula’s killing there, Correctional Deputy Mario Correa saw a detainee inside his cell smeared with blood. He was focused on cleaning the walls while his cellmate lay face down under a white sheet, blood flowing under the door.

“Is he breathing?” the guard asked the man, Erik Martinez, now 33, who stopped abruptly and shrugged.

Munoz Ayala, the cellmate, was unresponsive. Emergency workers declared him dead about 20 minutes later.

An autopsy found he had a skull fracture and seven puncture wounds to the neck. He and his cellmate had both been drinking alcohol, reports show. Martinez later admitted to the killing and told investigators that the men had argued about a rap song. He had been arrested about a year earlier after an unprovoked attack on a man outside a laundromat, killing him by repeated stabs to the neck.

Within days of the jail murder, two detectives from the department wrote reports for the criminal case. They referred to video footage, saying the two men entered their cell at 2:36 p.m. and it remained locked until 4:21 p.m., when Deputy Correa, the guard, did a security check. An internal investigator for the jail claimed that Munoz Ayala was “last seen alive” at 2:36 p.m., and a coroner deputy added that a routine security check was performed at 2:48 p.m., which no other report asserts.

But the timeline wasn’t true. Footage obtained by The New York Times and The Desert Sun shows that the two men moved freely outside their second-tier cell up until 3 p.m. that day, almost a half-hour later than claimed, and interacted with others from the first tier who had been let out to use the common room.

It is not known if those interactions contributed to the death or the cellmates’ acquisition of alcohol, but allowing detainees from multiple tiers out at the same time is a security violation. Deputies assigned to monitor surveillance video should have noticed the men moving throughout the cell block and called for intervention, the current and former employees said.

One of the detectives on the criminal case discovered the inaccuracies about 10 months later. He had asked the jail’s internal investigator for the footage while preparing for a court hearing, but was given video missing a crucial 20-minute portion. He obtained the complete video from someone else and wrote a revised timeline.

The video showed that after the two men returned to their cell, another detainee noticed a confrontation inside. After looking in the cell window at 3:49 p.m., the detainee alerted others in the common room, making a stabbing motion to his neck. Men from the lower tier gathered nearby, and several appear to have communicated with Martinez as he was wiping down the cell. All of that would have been considered suspicious activity, but deputies — some of whom are assigned to monitor security cameras — apparently didn’t notice and didn’t intervene until Deputy Correa’s security check more than 30 minutes later.

The Sheriff’s Department did not appear to take issue with these lapses and discrepancies. Instead, another internal investigator focused on the deputy’s late security checks in a report about seven months after the killing.

The investigator told Deputy Correa that he had been 97 minutes late for the security check when he discovered the body, which the deputy eventually conceded. During an interview, the guard said he had been trained to start a security check an hour after the previous one had been completed, even if he was running behind. Jail policy requires 12 security checks in a 12-hour shift, however, and a log for the day of the killing shows that Correa and his partner did only 10. Of those, seven started more than an hour after the prior one had ended.

The report found that, like Correa, many newer staff members — nearly 100 at the Murrieta jail — had been incorrectly trained, performing checks one to two hours late. Ultimately, investigators attributed the lapses to the jail’s software system and cleared Correa.

Munoz Ayala was the last of seven deaths at that jail in 2022. Correa was on shift during three of them, including one overdose and one apparent suicide. State law requires hourly security checks in case there is need for emergency medical treatment. Civil cases filed by the survivors of those seven detainees assert that a late security check was a contributing factor.

Nearly three years after Munoz Ayala’s murder, his former cellmate pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence.

But the Sheriff’s Department is still reporting to the California Department of Justice that Munoz Ayala’s death is under investigation and his cause of death pending. Accurately reporting that he was murdered would further raise the county jails’ homicide rate.

Justin Mayo contributed reporting.  Julie Tate contributed research.

Christopher Damien is a reporter focusing on law enforcement and incarceration in California as part of the Local Investigations Fellowship at The Times.

After the crowd’s heckling subsided and the tense meeting wound down, Macias had the final word, defending her leadership and promising that the stalled pool project would be resuscitated.

“I feel very confident where I stand,” said the mayor, who is in her third four-year term. “The aquatic center/pool project is not an illusion in the community and will soon be a reality.”

The council meeting on Friday, Feb. 28, included plenty of fireworks.

Longtime Huntington Park City Attorney Arnold Alvarez-Glasman abruptly tendered his resignation. “The current environment, the lack of communication with my office has made our continued representation unreasonably difficult,” Glasman said, reading from a letter addressed to the council.

Additionally, Vice Mayor Arturo Flores, who isn’t being investigated, delivered a fiery speech alleging efforts to recall him are connected to Efren Martinez, owner of Unified Consulting Services.

Martinez’s residence and office were searched by Los Angeles County district attorney’s investigators on Wednesday, Feb. 26, along with the homes of Macias, Huntington Park City Manager Ricardo Reyes, former Councilmembers Graciela Ortiz and Marilyn Sanabria. and current Councilmember Eddie Martinez. Search warrants also were served at the home of Edvin Tsaturyan and Sona Vardikyan, owners of JT Construction Group, which was hired by the city in 2019 to complete the pool project.

“This recall effort doesn’t reflect my record of service, but appears to be a retaliatory attempt to hinder transparency and accountability,” Flores said. “Let’s focus on investigating the failed pool project, let’s focus on retracing the millions of unaccounted dollars and restoring the faith and trust of local government to the people.”

The aquatic center project, approved years ago but never built, called for a 30,000-square-foot, two-story, state-of-the-art facility with an Olympic-size pool.

During the public comment portion of the meeting, a parade of residents assailed the City Council, with one man reflecting that the aquatic center controversy reminded him of the 2010 scandal that rocked nearby Bell involving widespread municipal corruption and financial misconduct.

Four former Huntington Park employees have sued the city, alleging they faced discrimination and retaliation for raising concerns about financial impropriety in connection with the aquatic center, said their attorney, Annette Harings. All four were placed on leave and three have been terminated.

The complaint, filed in 2020, accused the city of going on a “spending spree” that included entering into a “no-bid contract to build an unnecessary public pool which will cost a staggering $40,000,000.”

Huntington Park entered into the original contract, initially valued at $23 million, with JT Construction in 2019, records show. A resume provided to the city by JT Construction showed the company had not completed any projects similar to the proposed aquatic center in the previous 20 years.

The lawsuit alleges city officials colluded with Efren Martinez to use the “coffers of Huntington Park as their own personal piggy bank.” During an unsuccessful run for state Assembly in 2020, Martinez listed JT Construction as one of Unified Consulting’s clients.

Martinez could not be reached for comment.

The departed employees, all of whom had significant experience in City Hall, were replaced by “younger employees who did not have the same in-depth knowledge of how a finance department is supposed to work,” Harings claimed.

Three of the employees later settled with the city. A fourth is heading to trial this month.

Staff writer Jason Henry contributed to this article.

This article has also been updated to remove a sentence about an incident committed in the Harvard-Westlake locker room against Player Z. Although the incident removed from the story is alleged to have occurred against Player Z, the specific incident was not committed by Lucca van der Woude.

Clarification: This article has also been edited to clarify that in declining to comment about the juvenile case, van der Woude’s attorney cited confidentiality concerns.

Lucca van der Woude is one of American water polo’s brightest Olympic prospects.

This past fall, the 6-foot-4 defender was named the Orange County Register’s high school player of the year. He is a prized commitment for UCLA, the reigning NCAA champion. He is a star on USA Water Polo’s national youth team, often a stepping stone to the Olympic and World Championships teams. And in December, the sport’s national governing body enlisted him to mentor the next decade’s potential Olympians.

He is also an admitted sex offender.

Van der Woude, 17, admitted in Los Angeles County Juvenile Division Court on Nov. 7 to sexual penetration with a foreign object (digital penetration) against a minor, according to previously unreported Los Angeles County Juvenile Court, Los Angeles County Probation Department and U.S. Center for SafeSport documents obtained by the Southern California News Group (SCNG).

Van der Woude’s admission was part of a plea bargain deal with prosecutors.

Neither van der Woude’s admission nor his arrest at Harvard-Westlake nine months earlier have prevented him from transferring high schools, leading his new school, Newport Harbor, to a CIF title, representing Team USA internationally or in December mentoring the nation’s top 13- and 14-year-olds at a camp sponsored by USA Water Polo, the sport’s Irvine-based national governing body, at the nation’s most prestigious Olympic training site.

Los Angeles County Probation Department Court documents, a victim impact statement presented in Los Angeles Juvenile Court, sworn affidavits by a Harvard-Westlake player and one of his parents, and allegations in a series of complaints to the U.S. Center for SafeSport outline how Harvard-Westlake coaches and administrators failed to report allegations of van der Woude’s sexual battery to the victims’ parents or law enforcement officials, as required by law, or the U.S. Center for SafeSport. Harvard-Westlake coaches also ignored and minimized repeated racist comments directed by van der Woude toward teammates, according to allegations in the victim impact statement presented in juvenile court, sworn affidavits and complaints with the U.S. Center for SafeSport.

Jack Grover, Harvard-Westlake head coach and the director of Los Angeles Premier Water Polo, a USA Water Polo-affiliated club, is under formal investigation by the U.S. Center for SafeSport for failing to report the sexual misconduct immediately to the center as required by the SafeSport code, according to a Jan. 14 SafeSport email obtained by the SCNG.

One of the Harvard-Westlake and Los Angeles Premier teammates, van der Woude has admitted sexually battering is identified in this report as Player Z to protect his identity.

“He had the courage to speak up about being sexually assaulted, and Harvard-Westlake’s answer has been to call him a liar and look the other way,” said Daniel Watkins, an attorney for Meier Watkins LLP and who represents Player Z and his family. “They failed to protect him when it mattered most, then retaliated against him and tried to silence him for daring to speak the truth. The community deserves accountability, and no institution — no matter how powerful — can escape its day of reckoning.”

The U.S. Center for SafeSport was informed on April 11, 2024, of allegations of van der Woude’s sexual battery of two Harvard-Westlake students and was provided with the names of school employees with alleged knowledge of the incidents, yet van der Woude has continued to be invited to and participate, both as a player and mentor, in USA Water Polo training camps and international tournaments designed to identify and develop future Olympians, according to SafeSport documents and USA Water Polo records.

“An individual — like Lucca van der Woude — who has sexually battered multiple teammates multiple times, and over the course of years; lied and misled authorities about his criminal conduct, until he admitted them in court; defamed his victims in an attempt to protect his own reputation; and violated no-contact orders almost two dozen times while playing in USA Water Polo-sanctioned events (without informing USA Water Polo), should not be allowed to participate in USA Water Polo,” the parent of one of his Harvard-Westlake victims alleged in a complaint to the U.S. Center for SafeSport.

USA Water Polo invited van der Woude to work as a “mentor” at a USAWP-sponsored Holiday Camp for the nation’s top eighth-grade players in December at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. His participation in the camp came five months after USA Water Polo officials were informed by his attorney that he had a court-ordered no-contact restriction placed on him prohibiting him from being in the pool or locker-room at the same time as a Harvard-Westlake and Team USA teammate and that the court order was related to “sexual misconduct,” according to allegations in U.S. Center for SafeSport complaints, sworn affidavits and a person with direct knowledge of the conversations. The teammate is one of the individuals van der Woude has since admitted to sexually battering.

Sally Wiggins, USA Water Polo chief of compliance and human resources, and Anne Laurence, the organization’s senior director of the Olympic Development Program and Pipeline, were among those informed of the no-contact order in July 2024, according to interviews.

Despite the no-contact order issued on April 26 and that runs through March 7, van der Woude has had contact with one victim on at least 23 occasions at USA Water Polo-sanctioned national team selection and training camps, top flight tournaments and international competitions with Team USA, according to allegations made to SafeSport by a Harvard-Westlake and Los Angeles Premier Water Polo player and his parents, other SafeSport documents, USA Water Polo records and interviews.

Prior to the court order but after his arrest, van der Woude had contact with Player Z at two USA Water Polo events. At an Olympic Development Program practice conducted by USA Water Polo in Thousand Oaks on March 10, “There was significant physical contact in the pool” between van der Woude and a Harvard-Westlake and Los Angeles Premier Water Polo Club teammate, Player Z, according to allegations in a complaint to SafeSport.

During a National Team Selection Camp in Fullerton, April 19-21, also organized by USA Water Polo, there was again “physical contact” in the pool between van der Woude and Player Z, according to a SafeSport complaint.

Van der Woude remains on USA Water Polo’s national youth team roster even though the  U.S. Center for SafeSport temporarily suspended him on January 14, 2025, from participating in any way in any event sanctioned by USA Water Polo, including matches or practices, while it continues its investigation of him, according to SafeSport documents and interviews conducted by the SCNG.

Van der Woude’s arrest also raises questions about whether his transfer from Harvard-Westlake to Newport Harbor violated CIF Southern Section rules. The CIF Southern Section approved the transfer on Aug. 22 because of a “Valid Change of Residence,” according to the CIF Southern Section website.

“CIF Defined ‘Valid Change of Residence’ certified by the receiving school in accordance with bylaw 206 and all other applicable eligibility rules; student is eligible in all sports at any level. If it is later found that the student DID NOT complete a valid change in accordance with the Bylaw, the school will forfeit any contests in which the student played,” the CIF Southern Section wrote regarding the van der Woude transfer.

But CIF Southern Section rules also state, “Students who have disciplinary action taken or pending at the previous school are not eligible to transfer” and “Students who left a school for disciplinary reasons are not eligible to participate in athletics at the new school.”

Van der Woude’s family moved into a home in Costa Mesa in June, according to property records, although probation department records list his home in Sherman Oaks.

Newport Harbor’s CIF final victory, led by van der Woude, secured the school’s 15th CIF title in boys water polo, a record for Southern Section boys water polo. The team featured two other key seniors besides van der Woude, who joined the team as offseason transfers.

“We followed the proper CIF process, and the student was deemed eligible to compete,” Annette Franco, the Newport-Mesa Unified School District public relations officer, said in an email to the SCNG. “For any further questions regarding this matter, we recommend you contact CIF Southern Section.”

Grover, an honorable mention All-American at UCLA, was an assistant coach on USA Water Polo’s national team for the World Aquatics U-16 Championships last June 18-24 in Malta, according to USA Water Polo press releases. Team USA’s head coach for the tournament was Ross Sinclair, the Newport Harbor High School head coach and director of Newport Beach Water Polo, a USA Water Polo-affiliated club.

Sinclair declined to comment for this article.

Van der Woude’s continued participation also raises questions about the U.S. Center for SafeSport policy of not listing banned or suspended minor athletes in its public database of disciplined coaches, athletes and officials. The Center does not list disciplinary action taken against minor-age athletes or participants because of legal concerns. Athlete safety advocates argue that the policy prevents parents from knowing if the minor-aged individuals their children are teammates with, playing against or being coached by have been sanctioned for sexual, physical or emotional abuse, bullying for racist behavior.

“The Center’s Centralized Disciplinary Database (CDD) is the first of its kind and is key to enforcing its sanctions and ensuring better accountability,” the U.S. Center for SafeSport said in a statement to SCNG. “Federal law requires the Center to list adult participants who have been barred from sport on the CDD. There are a myriad of reasons the courts, criminal justice system, and administrative entities such as the Center handle sanctions against minors differently. The USOPC and NGBs are notified of all measures, including those involving minors, and have the same obligation to enforce those as they do an adult participant. Failing to enforce the Center’s findings and measures, is a violation of the SafeSport Code and could lead to its own disciplinary outcome.”

Van der Woude, over the 16-month period, allegedly sexually battered a teammate in and out of the pool, according to probation department and U.S. Center for SafeSport documents obtained by the SCNG as well as interviews and two sworn affidavits.  He also routinely directed the N-Word and other racist comments at Harvard-Westlake and Los Angeles Premier Water Polo Club teammates, according to allegations in a victim impact statement and U.S. Center for SafeSport complaints, emails, sworn affidavits and interviews.

One of the victims, Player Z, was 14 when he was first sexually battered by van der Woude, according to juvenile court and U.S. Center for SafeSport documents.

Harvard-Westlake officials failed to notify parents that their children had been allegedly sexually battered by van der Woude after the two victims confirmed to two school administrators in December 2023 that they had been sexually abused by the star player, a former Harvard-Westlake player and his parents allege in a victim impact statement provided to juvenile court, U.S. Center for SafeSport documents and sworn affidavits obtained by the SCNG.

Player Z’s parents did not learn about van der Woude’s sexual battery of their son until Player Z confirmed the allegations in an interview with a Los Angeles Police Department detective on Feb. 29, 2024, a day after van der Woude was arrested in class at Harvard-Westlake, according to sworn affidavits, complaints to SafeSport, emails and interviews.

When asked by the family in May to provide documents on the sexual battery, the school denied having any information about the incidents, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

The Los Angeles Police Department was notified of van der Woude’s alleged sexual battery by the parent of a different Harvard-Westlake student, according to a person familiar with the case.

“Harvard-Westlake has never reported allegations to any authorities,” Player Z’s parents allege in multiple SafeSport complaints.

Susan Oliver, an attorney representing Harvard-Westlake, did not respond to a request for comment. Instead Dana Furman, a senior partner at Tyson-Mendes, Oliver’s law firm, emailed the SCNG a statement: “Our firm does not have any comment beyond recognizing that we represent Harvard-Westlake, a school Mr. van der Woude formerly attended.”

Richard Commons, the Harvard-Westlake president, did not address specific allegations against the school and its employees but in a statement said, “In regard to your questions, the school took reports of the alleged incident seriously, followed with responsible actions to investigate, and cooperated with law enforcement officials who further investigated the allegations. The school complied with all mandated reporter requirements.

“The school also took action to examine its water polo program and culture, including its policies and practices, and initiated additional training consistent with the National Federation of State High School Associations and California Interscholastic Federation.”

Grover did not respond to multiple phone calls requesting comment or to a detailed email from the SCNG outlining the allegations against van der Woude and him.

Van der Woude was declared “a ward of the court” during the Nov. 7 hearing, according to Los Angeles County Probation Department documents. Van der Woude is required to report to a probation officer in Van Nuys, according to juvenile court and probation records.

Van der Woude’s attorney declined to comment about the juvenile case and cited confidentiality concerns. The SCNG provided van der Woude a detailed list of the allegations against him. He did not respond to a request seeking comment.

UCLA head coach Adam Wright did not respond to a request for comment.

Juvenile court proceedings and records are not public. The SCNG typically does not name juvenile offenders but is doing so in this case because of van der Woude’s continued interaction with minors.

‘Living and learning with integrity’

Harvard-Westlake has been described by the Hollywood Reporter as “the titan of L.A.’s private schools.”

Its alumni include Grammy and Golden Globe winners, Academy Award- and Emmy-nominated actors, directors and screenwriters, former Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, former California Gov. Gray Davis, tycoon Jean Paul Getty Sr., Olympic gold medalists, a president of ABC News, the co-founder of Zillow, astronaut Sally Ride, a member of Great Britain’s Parliament, and H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff during the Watergate scandal.

Harvard School, a military boarding school for boys, was founded in 1900 in a barley field at the corner of Western Avenue and Venice Boulevard. The Westlake School for girls was established four years later. The two schools merged in 1991. The school is not affiliated with Harvard University. Today the school is split between two campuses, a middle school campus in Holmby Hills with the “Upper School,” the high school, located in Studio City.

Of the school’s roughly 290 graduates last year, 48 went on to attend Ivy League schools, 14 enrolling in Harvard alone. Harvard-Westlake’s annual tuition is $52,500 with additional expenses for meals, books and activities running between $2,500 and $3,500. New students must also pay a $2,500 fee. The school reported revenues of $154 million for the 2024 fiscal year and $656 million in assets, according to an Internal Revenue Service filing.

“Harvard-Westlake strives to be a diverse and inclusive community united by the joyful pursuit of educational excellence, living and learning with integrity, and purpose beyond ourselves,” the school said on its website.

But minority students were allegedly subjected to racist comments by van Der Woude on almost a daily basis, according to Player Z’s juvenile court victim impact statement, complaints to SafeSport and interviews. The racist comments began during a Harvard-Westlake team trip to Barcelona in March 2023.

When Black players told coaches about being subjected to being called the N-word or variations of it, on a daily basis by van Der Woude and another teammate, the coaches did not believe them, according to allegations in the victim impact statement and SafeSport complaints. Even after a player admitted to using the racial slur, Harvard-Westlake coaches did not punish the player but instead took the path of what Player Z described in his victim impact statement as “granting him grace.” Player Z’s parents make similar allegations in sworn affidavits and SafeSport complaints.

Van der Woude’s sexual battery and his racist comments allegedly continued into the fall of 2023, according to interviews, a victim impact statement provided to juvenile court and Los Angeles County Probation Department documents, SafeSport complaints and sworn affidavits.

At least one other Harvard-Westlake player besides van Der Woude directed a racial slur at a teammate, according to two affidavits. Three Harvard-Westlake teammates allegedly pressured the player the racial slur was directed at not to report the incident to school officials, according to two sworn affidavits and interviews.

That October, a van der Woude racist comment to a teammate prompted that player’s mother to call Player Z’s father “crying to tell him about it,” Player Z said.

“My parents then asked me whether that ever happened to me, and I admitted to them for the first time that it happened virtually every day, and we had a long conversation about how much worse things had become since the Barcelona trip,” Player Z said in his victim impact statement. “That night I also decided that it was time to stand up against that kind of racism given the impact I saw it was having on my teammate.

“After I disclosed to the coaching staff that Lucca and another student had been using this racist language for several months, there was an investigation and when it was over Lucca and the other teammate were suspended from playing two games.

“And just like that my situation went from very bad to sometimes unmanageable. I would sometimes eat my lunch in the dean’s office just to have a break as more lies were spread about me. Even a coach told me that my only option was to turn the other cheek and try to be a good teammate while being shunned by most people on the team because I disclosed what happened to me. If I tried to focus alone and give them space, they said I thought I was better than them, if I tried to be a part of the group, they ignored me. I knew that I was alone, and it was a very difficult time in my life.”

It would get worse.

“The first time that I told someone about how Lucca was touching me was in December 2023,” Player Z said. “(Another Harvard-Westlake student) seemed very traumatized after the incident with Lucca. He was discussing his experience with two of the deans, and I was sitting next to him for support. Lucca denied assaulting (the other student), and so no one believed (the other student), but I told (the other student) and the two Harvard-Westlake deans that I believed him because it had been happening to me for a long time.”

Player Z said he met with Jordan Church, Harvard-Westlake’s dean of students, and Sharon Cuseo, dean of the school’s upper campus, according to sworn affidavits and interviews.

Player Z outlined to Harvard-Westlake administration officials that van der Woude’s sexual battery began the first day of freshman water polo practice in August 2022 and had “continued (both inside and outside the pool) until December 2023,” according to SafeSport complaints.

“Harvard-Westlake did not report it to any authorities or to us, as (Player Z’s) parents,” the player’s parents wrote in a Dec. 5, 2024, complaint to SafeSport. Church and Cuseo did not respond to phone messages or detailed emails outlining the allegations against van der Woude and the school.

Two months later, van der Woude was arrested by LAPD at school. Although he did not return to the school after the arrest, Harvard-Westlake players and some of their classmates lashed out at van der Woude’s victims, students and parents allege in SafeSport complaints and sworn affidavits and Player Z’s victim impact statement. Van der Woude eventually admitted to sexual penetration with a foreign object (digital penetration) against a minor. At the hearing, as part of his plea agreement with prosecutors, one of two charges of this offense was dropped. The remaining charge will be dismissed if van de Woude fulfills the terms of his probation. With the admission, he avoided a trial scheduled for Nov. 19.

“Believe it or not, even after Lucca was arrested at the end of February 2024, my time at Harvard-Westlake became even more toxic,” Player Z said. “People assumed that I had called the police or reported Lucca’s behavior, but I had not.”

A sibling at the school’s middle school campus “began receiving threats about what people thought that I had done,” Player Z said. “(The sibling) was being told that our family had messed with the wrong people.”

At one point, the sibling retreated to the dean’s office, afraid to remain at the school.

Player Z’s parents withdrew him from Harvard-Westlake last May 6. In doing so, the parents “expressly cited (among other things) the school’s failure to protect from aggravated sexual battery and to comply with its mandatory reporting obligations,” according to the Dec. 5 SafeSport complaint.

“I will not, I cannot let this defeat me,” Player Z said in his victim impact statement. “I try every day to turn it around and try to use these disgusting memories to make me a better person.”

Failure to report

One of the Harvard-Westlake employees who allegedly received the May 6 email was Grover, according to sworn affidavits, SafeSport complaints and interviews.

Player Z and his parents allege that Harvard-Westlake was aware of the sexual battery of the two players as early as December 2023 and then again when van der Woude was arrested at the school on Feb. 28, 2024.

The U.S. Center for SafeSport, established in 2017 under the authorization of Congress, has the scope and authority to resolve abuse and misconduct reports for more than 11 million athletes participating in the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic movement. The center is also charged with developing and enforcing policies, procedures and training to prevent abuse and misconduct. The Center’s SafeSport Code governs all participants in the American Olympic movement.

The SafeSport code prohibits sexual harassment, nonconsensual sexual contact (or attempts to commit the same), nonconsensual sexual intercourse (or attempts to commit the same), sexual exploitation, exposing a minor to sexual content/imagery and sexual bullying behavior and sexual hazing.

The SafeSport Code also states that “Criminal Conduct is relevant to an individual’s fitness to participate in sport. The age of a Criminal Charge or Disposition is not relevant to whether a violation of the Code occurred but may be considered for Sanctioning purposes.”

Under the California Penal Code, school employees such as teachers, coaches, employees and administrators are considered “mandated reporters” of child abuse, including sexual abuse, or neglect to a police or sheriff’s department (not including the school district police department or school security department), a county probation department or a county welfare department or county child protective services.

Failure to report is punishable by up to six months in jail and/or up to a $1,000 fine.

The SafeSport Code also requires that “an adult participant,” such as a coach “who learns of information or reasonably suspects that a child has suffered an incident of child abuse, including sexual abuse, must immediately: a. Make a report to law enforcement AND b. Make a report to the U.S. Center for SafeSport AND c. Comply with any other applicable reporting requirements under state law.”

“Reporting to the Center alone is not sufficient,” the Code states. “You must report to both the Center and to law enforcement, and comply with any other applicable state or federal laws.

“Adult Participants must know their reporting requirements under this Code, state law, and federal law. Ignorance or mistake as to one’s reporting obligation is not a defense.

“Nothing in this Code shall be construed to require a victim of Child Abuse or other misconduct to self-report. The reporting requirements under this section are an individual obligation of each Adult Participant. Reporting to a supervisor or administrator does not relieve an Adult Participant of the obligations to report as specified under this section. Adult Participants must report even if they believe someone else has already reported. Adult Participants must follow any other reporting requirements imposed by their organization, including adherence to state and federal laws.

“The obligation to report is broader than reporting a pending charge or criminal arrest of a Participant; it requires reporting to the Center any conduct which, if true, would constitute Sexual Misconduct or Child Abuse. The obligation to report to the Center is an ongoing one and is not satisfied simply by making an initial report. The obligation includes reporting, on a timely basis, all information of which an Adult Participant becomes aware, including the names of witnesses, third-party reporters, and Claimants. The obligation to report includes providing the personally identifying information of a potential Claimant to the extent known at the time of the report, as well as a duty to reasonably supplement the report as to identifying information learned at a later time.”

The U.S. Center for SafeSport typically only opens formal failure-to-report investigations of adult participants if there is no record of the adult reporting alleged sexual abuse to the Center, according to two people familiar with the process.

The SafeSport Code also prohibits hazing, including “Ridiculing, taunting, name-calling, or intimidating or threatening to cause someone harm.” It also prohibits harassment that reflects “a discriminatory bias in an attempt to establish dominance, superiority, or power over an individual or group based on age, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, national origin, or mental or physical disability; or Any act or conduct described as harassment under federal or state law.”

Player Z and his family said they did not learn of the no-contact court order against van der Woude until July 26, 2024, shortly before Player Z was scheduled to travel with the U.S. national youth team for a tournament in Budapest. Van der Woude was also scheduled to compete for Team USA in Budapest.

“We immediately notified the Court that Lucca and (Player Z) would be participating on the same team in a USAWP Youth National Team tournament in Budapest, from August 1-3, 2024,” Player Z’s parents wrote in a formal complaint to SafeSport. “But Lucca headed to Budapest for this tournament without first telling USAWP about his no-contact order. On the day of Lucca’s arrival, his attorney notified (USA Water Polo high performance director) Kyle Boal and (Team USA) Coach Derek Clappis of the no-contact order. Mr. Boal understandably explained that there was no way that Lucca and (Player Z) could be on the same team without violating the Court’s no-contact order. As the Court had noted, however, it was Lucca’s responsibility to comply with the Court order, and during the Budapest trip, Lucca violated the no-contact order at least seven times. When these violations were raised with the Court, prior to Lucca’s scheduled trial, Lucca’s attorney blamed USA Water Polo.”

Shortly after the U.S. team arrived in Budapest, at around 1 a.m. local time, Boal said in an interview with the SCNG, “I get a phone call from Lucca’s attorney. She was the first person that told me about (the no-contact order).”

He and Clappis found out about the court order “in a pretty drastic way.”

The attorney, Boal said, admitted that the court order was related to “sexual misconduct” but “didn’t say much more.”

Clappis did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Boal said he informed Wiggins and Laurence shortly after receiving the call from van der Woude’s attorney.

Player Z suffered a panic attack during the Budapest trip, his parents wrote in a letter to SafeSport.

Their son, they continued, “as all victims, should not be penalized or further victimized because Lucca has perpetrated these crimes against him.

“Lucca’s actions are unacceptable and his behavior in ignoring and blatantly violating no-contact orders raises serious questions about (Player Z’s) safety and that of other water polo athletes.”

Despite USA Water Polo officials being made aware of the court-ordered no-contact restriction on van der Woude, the national governing body still invited van der Woude to the December Holiday Camp at the USOPC Training Center in Colorado Springs.

The Holiday Camp, established in 1985, is described by USA Water Polo as “one of its greatest events” where the sport’s rising stars “learn from some of the best coaches our country has to offer.”

The camp is overseen by USA Water Polo’s Olympic Development Program (ODP), the department headed by Laurence.

Laurence and Wiggins did not respond to phone calls or emails requesting comment.

“They invite some seniors to come and, like, mentor and help out,” van der Woude told the SCNG in December after working at the camp. “And, yeah, I went. It was fun. I like coaching a lot. So it was kind of fun, like, help coach, like, younger kids.”

During the interview, Sinclair said that van der Woude had indeed “inquired” about coaching at Newport Beach Water Polo and the coach said van der Woude be coaching younger players.

“The 10s, 12s, 14s,” Sinclair said, referring to the ages of the players he envisioned van der Woude coaching.

In reading his victim impact statement to the juvenile court last November, Player Z recalled that he was just 14 when van der Woude first sexually battered him.

He also recalled the last time.

“That was in December 2023,” Player Z said, referring to a period after he had informed Harvard-Westlake officials about being sexually battered by van der Woude for the previous 16 months.

“I was walking up a staircase at school and Lucca was walking up behind me and (sexually battered me),” he continued. “I was really shocked, because everyone was talking about it and I figured at this point even he would decide to stop. I reacted the way that I often did, which was to clench my butt cheeks, to swat away his hand, and to try to act like it wasn’t happening, and he still did it and gave the same awful smile after.”

Staff writer Dan Albano contributed to this report.

California published its final report on lead in school drinking water in 2020. At that time, 18 of the Inland Empire’s four dozen districts and other education agencies had lead in campus drinking fountains or sinks, according to the State Water Resources Control Board’s last listing.

The California Department of Public Health warns that lead exposure can harm a child’s nervous system and brain. Impossible to see, smell or taste, it can cause anemia. And very high levels can result in organ damage and lead to seizures or death.

After testing, all these districts fixed the problems by replacing pipes, shutting off drinking fountains and adding filters to sinks. Still, many Inland students in recent years likely drank water with lead levels higher than the recommended standard.

“I don’t know that anyone wouldn’t, if the lead surpassed the certain level, take immediate action,” said Gregory Franklin, a former superintendent of the Tustin Unified School District and now a professor of clinical education at USC’s Rossier School of Education.

But replacing lead pipes takes money and time.

“It’s hard to do a big construction project without a bond or state matching money,” Franklin said. “Most of the money that goes to school districts for deferred maintenance goes to repairing roofs, reslurrying asphalt or replacing air conditioning units.”

Districts would have to do such a big project over the summer — when every other district wants to — driving up costs. Or if done during the school year, districts would have to find another place for students during construction.

“When you are opening up trenches or tearing down walls, it’s hard to run school,” Franklin said.

In the U.S., there are at least three major standards — each set by a different agency or group — for lead in drinking water:

• According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, water is unsafe for human consumption when it contains more than 15 parts per billion of lead particles.
• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration wants bottled water to have only 5 parts per billion.
• And the American Academy of Pediatrics says children should be exposed to no more than 1 part per billion of lead in water.

Eighteen Inland Empire districts had schools with lead levels above 15 parts per billion in some of their drinking water between 2017 and 2019, according to the 2020 report:

• Alta Loma Elementary School District
• Barstow Unified School District
• Chino Valley Unified School District
• Colton Joint Unified School District
• Corona-Norco Unified School District
• Fontana Unified School District
• Hemet Unified School District
• Morongo Unified School District
• Perris Union High School District
• Redlands Unified School District
• Rialto Unified School District
• Rim of the World Unified School District
• Riverside County Office of Education
• Riverside Unified School District
• San Bernardino City Unified School District
• San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools
• Val Verde Unified School District
• Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified School District

But every local district listed in the State Water Resources Control Board’s spreadsheet exceeded the 5 parts per billion threshold that the FDA warns is dangerous.

“Any amount of lead can be dangerous,” said Dr. Tejal Khandhar, a pediatrician with UC Riverside Health. “It can lead to developmental delays, learning difficulties, lower IQ, abdominal pains. And many times, it’s not high enough for them to have symptoms.”

Younger children are more at risk than older children. Pediatricians such as Khandhar routinely test 1- and 2-year-olds for lead exposure.

The body’s natural filtration systems mean that older children and adults can remove more ingested lead. But it’s not good for anyone.

“It can definitely still affect their learning,” Khandhar said. “They can get developmental delays, they still get lower IQs.”

A December study by researchers at Duke University and Florida State University suggests lead exposure may have helped cause 151 million cases of psychiatric disorders among Americans over the past 75 years.

Samantha Ying, an assistant professor of soil biogeochemistry and co-director of the UC Global Health Institute Planetary Health Center at UCR studies metal containments, particularly arsenic, chromium, manganese, iron, vanadium and has expertise in drinking water and lead.

Ying said that some metals, like manganese, have a type of micronutrient and that, while it is debated how much of the metal one can safely drink, it is known to have some function in the human body.

That’s not the case with lead — which the body doesn’t need at all.

“So you actually need manganese in your body versus things like lead and arsenic,” Ying said. “We have zero need for those metals in our body, which is why they are more regulated.”

Studies show that extended or chronic consumption of even low concentrations of lead can have an impact, she said. For health reasons, people should not have lead in their bodies because it is not something the body produces naturally, Ying said. The guidelines don’t follow this health standard, she said.

“So, for example, for arsenic, like I said, there’s zero amounts of arsenic that your body needs,” Ying said. “…The health goal, is zero, like, let’s just not intake any arsenic, since we don’t need it.”

She said regulatory agencies don’t call for zero amounts of a substance, often because of the economic costs of monitoring and treating.

One way to help teenagers’ bodies filter out lead is a diet high in calcium and iron, Khandhar said.

“That’s one of the reasons it’s so important for teens to have a healthy diet,” she said.

In 2017, Assembly Bill 746 required community water systems to test lead levels in drinking water at all California public K-12 school sites built before 2010. It was intended to find places that had more than the EPA’s 15 parts per billion standard.

The law required California’s State Water Resources Control Board to update its spreadsheet of reports of lead in drinking water in California schools one last time at the end of 2020.

Since then, school districts have taken steps to prevent students from drinking water with high amounts of lead.

In 2024, the state looked to fund infrastructure improvements, including reducing lead in drinking water with money from Proposition 2, which voters approved in November. The bond measure will provide $8.5 billion for construction at schools from transitional kindergarten to high schools.

The proposition allocates up to $115 million for reducing lead levels in water at public schools.

The last time districts received a state funding boost for infrastructure improvements was Proposition 51 in 2016, which authorized $9 billion in bonds.

To receive Proposition 2 money, districts must have matching funds. The state will usually pay 50% of new construction projects and 60% of the cost for renovations. The rest falls to school districts to pay for with local dollars, generally bonds.

The Inland Empire school districts that had high levels of lead in their drinking water between 2017 and 2019 all appear to have followed similar courses of action, based on answers from those that responded to requests for comment.

They replaced lead pipes, shut off drinking fountains or found alternate water supplies. In other instances, follow-up testing suggested the high lead levels were due to false positives on an earlier test.

Drinking water samples from three sinks at the Chino Valley Unified School District’s Glenmeade Elementary School showed 21 and 180 parts per billion of lead — 12 times more than the 15 parts per billion that the EPA declares is a safe level to drink.

A district plumber fixed the issue at schools where levels of lead were above the federal standard, district spokesperson Andrea Johnston said in an email.

The most recent report of lead in drinking water from Chino came in 2023. Three campuses — Anna Borba Elementary School, Marshall Elementary School and Alicia Cortes Elementary School — reported lead in drinking water. After the report, plumbers replaced pipes, faucets and added filters, Johnston said.

This is normal any time a report of lead in drinking water is made, Johnston said.

A drinking fountain outside the cafeteria at Colton Joint Unified’s Terrace View Elementary School in September and October 2017 showed 25 and 73 parts per billion of lead — almost five times what the EPA declares is a safe level to drink.

The district replaced those pipes that November, spokesperson Katie Orloff said. Two later tests showed levels had dropped to 5 and 7.8 parts per billion, above what the FDA and pediatricians recommend, but in line with the EPA and state law.

“For results requiring corrective action, our district facilities and maintenance staff acted promptly to ensure that the water available to students and staff is well within the standard for safe drinking water established by AB 746,” Orloff wrote in an email. “We take these guidelines extremely seriously and appreciate the partnership of our local water agencies in helping us to meet them.”

At Redlands Unified’s Orangewood High School, drinking water samples on three occasions in 2018 showed levels of 18, 26 and 34 parts per million of lead. That’s up to double what the EPA says is safe.

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The district took the faucet out of service in 2018 and it hasn’t been used since, spokesperson Christine Stephens said. It has been replaced by a newer drinking fountain.

“To ensure continued access to safe drinking water for students and staff, a replacement water filter was installed in the same” spot, Stephens wrote in an email.

A classroom sink at Highland Elementary School in Norco, in the Corona-Norco Unified School District, showed 160 parts per billion of lead in the water in 2019. That’s more than 10 times what the EPA says is safe.

The district replaced those pipes and the faucet, spokesperson Brittany Foust said.

“Fifteen parts per billion is equivalent to about one drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool,” Foust said.

The most recent districtwide test was in 2019, and only Highland had lead in the water above the 15 parts per billion level, she said. After the district completed the repairs, the sink didn’t test positive for lead, according to Foust.

An Anza-based Christian college under federal investigation for alleged labor trafficking and money laundering has been ordered to cease operation for failing to adhere to state educational guidelines and mandates.

Administrative Law Judge Debra Nye-Perkins, in decision that became effective Dec. 10, revoked Olivet University’s license and ordered officials to stop enrolling new students and to propose a plan within 30 days to “teach out” its current students, allowing them to complete their courses, perhaps at another institution, after the campus shuts down.

Nye-Perkins also ordered Olivet to pay more than $64,000 for the cost of the state investigation that found 14 violations during site inspections at Olivet’s Anza and Mill Valley campuses in 2022 and 2023. That probe prompted Attorney General Rob Bonta to file a complaint, called an accusation, with the Department of Consumer Affairs in April 2023 on behalf of Deborah Cochrane, chief of the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education.

In her 107-page decision, Nye-Perkins stated that Olivet officials continued to show a “cavalier attitude” toward compliance with state education statutes and regulations and “minimized its failure” to abide by them during a three-day administrative hearing last month.

“The only degree of discipline that would ensure public protection is the revocation of respondent’s approval to operate,” Nye-Perkins said in her Dec. 5 decision.

Olivet’s violations, according to the April 2023 accusation, included insufficient course offerings and staffing, faculty lacking contracts and minimum education requirements, failure to show sufficient financial resources, and failure to have student enrollment agreements and other records immediately available.

During last month’s hearing, six witnesses — including three special investigators — testified on behalf of the BPPE, which was represented by Deputy Attorney General Dionne Mochon. During her closing argument, Mochon said the testimony established that many of the violations investigators found at Olivet during the investigation continue to apply today.

Seven witnesses testified on behalf of Olivet, including university President Jonathan Park, Vice President Walker Tzeng and former President Matthias Gebhardt. Olivet did not have an attorney present during the hearing, and university representatives did not respond to questions asking why.

In a statement posted on its website on Sunday, Dec. 15, Park said the university is planning to appeal Nye-Perkins’ decision. In a further statement on Dec. 17, Park said Olivet would continue to operate in California under a religious exemption, which allows the university to offer education and degrees to theology students, who comprise the majority of its student body.

“This step reflects the University’s commitment to continuing its mission and activities while upholding its core values and principles as a Christian institution,” Park said in the statement. “The University remains dedicated to serving its students and community during this transitional period.”

History of Olivet

Olivet was established by David Jang, a Korean Christian pastor and professor, in the Bay Area in 2000 as Olivet Theological College & Seminary. In 2004, it was incorporated as Olivet University, with its curriculum and programs tailored for ministry-bound students from all over the world, mainly China.

In 2014, the university purchased its 1,000-acre property in Anza, situated in the San Jacinto Mountains east of Temecula, and established its headquarters there.

Aside from its main Anza campus, the university has 11 satellite campuses across the U.S., according to its accreditor, the Association for Biblical Higher Education.

Hearing

During the livestreamed hearing, Park and Tzeng accused Newsweek, a New York-based weekly news magazine owned by two former members of the Olivet sect, of weaponizing their publication and using it to trigger the state’s investigation. They asserted the investigation was tainted by the media as well as racial and religious bias.

Park and Tzeng also challenged the competency of the state investigators, maintaining that, while not perfect nor denying that fixes were needed at the school, Olivet has addressed some of the problems and was working to repair others.

Park said the state probe should not have risen to the level it had, and that better communication and coordination between the state and Olivet officials could have saved time and produced better results.

Ongoing issues

Nye-Perkins noted in her decision that Olivet was cited by the state in January 2020 for failing to submit student performance fact sheets in the correct format and with the necessary supporting documentation and data. Despite the citation, Olivet continued to fail in complying with the law, according to the decision.

In February 2020, Olivet pleaded guilty in New York to a misdemeanor count of conspiracy and a felony count of falsifying business records in a scheme to fraudulently obtain $35 million from lenders. The university was ordered to pay $1.25 million in forfeiture over two years.

Olivet met all the conditions of its plea agreement, and, as a result, the charge of falsifying business records was reduced to a misdemeanor in February 2022, according to a spokesperson at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

In November 2022, the university’s accreditor, the Association for Biblical Higher Education, placed Olivet on warning status through February 2024 for failing to demonstrate “integrity in all of its practices and relationships with strict adherence to ethical standards and its own stated policies.”

The ABHE also criticized Olivet for failing in “honest and open communication” with its accrediting, licensing and governing agencies and compliance with legal and governmental regulations.

In August 2023, Olivet University, President Park and World Olivet Assembly were among 18 defendants in a lawsuit filed by Texas-based e-commerce company 8fig alleging they used a network of online storefronts and other companies to defraud it of more than $6.5 million. The parties to the suit are in settlement talks, according to Newsweek 

Federal investigation

In April 2021, special agents with Homeland Security Investigations and Riverside County sheriff’s and district attorney’s investigators served a search warrant at Olivet’s Anza campus in an investigation into allegations of labor trafficking, money laundering and visa fraud. The warrant remains under seal.

Additionally, four former students have sued Olivet alleging they were victims of human labor trafficking and forced to work, without pay, after coming overseas to attend the school on full scholarships.

The former students — Dawin Liranzo Galan, Roland Broccko, Minerva Ruiz and Rebecca Singh — traveled from Spain, Venezuela and India to the U.S. on student visas obtained through Olivet so they could attend the school in 2017 and early 2018. But when they arrived in the high desert town, they were told they had to work to pay off their debt, according to the lawsuit.

Olivet has denied the allegations, and the lawsuit has been stayed pending the federal criminal investigation.

According to joint motion filed in federal court in April 2024 requesting the case be stayed, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Riverside confirmed it was conducting a criminal investigation into Olivet and was up against a statute of limitation to file any criminal charges.

In a 14-page report issued Nov. 25, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights concluded that administrators at Cesar E. Chavez Middle School and the San Bernardino City Unified School District were “deliberately indifferent” to a non-English-speaking mother’s report of her daughter’s sexual assault in a restroom stall by two boys. Administrators did not follow federal Title IX regulations in investigating complaints of the attack, according to the report.

Title IX was enacted in 1972 to protect individuals from sex-based discrimination, including sexual assault. Title VI, which the OCR also found the district violated, prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin.

“This school did all the wrong things,” said Steven Figueroa, an advocate for the girl and her mother who filed the complaint with the federal agency in February 2023 that triggered its investigation. The complaint alleged the district told the girl’s mother it was “overwhelmed with complaints” and, therefore, did not investigate.

Figueroa said he was astonished by the lack of supervision and security at the school that allowed the assault to occur in the first place, as well as the school’s alleged failure to provide mental health services for the girl’s severe trauma or an individualized education program after her grades started slipping from A’s to D’s and F’s.

Recorded on video

The alleged rape occurred on Oct. 11, 2022, and was recorded on video by another student who entered the restroom while the girl and boy were engaged in the sex acts. He shared the video with two other students who then posted it online, according to the report.

One of the students edited the video to include text that said “Whore” before posting it on social media. He subsequently recorded another video of the girl as she was walking out of the school cafeteria, labeling the video with text saying, “Should Not Have (expletive)” and “You Should Have Not Done It” before posting it online, according to the OCR report.

The sex video circulated online for more than eight months, and the girl was subjected to continual bullying by other students at school, according to the report.

“They would follow her at school, laughing at her, saying, ‘We saw you on the video,’ and she would just break down,” Figueroa said.

When the girl’s mother followed up with Principal Robert Morales about the incessant bullying, Morales, who is now the district’s human resources director of recruitment and employment, told her there was “nothing he could do,” according to the report.

School administrators became aware of the video on Oct. 12, the day after the alleged rape, after pandemonium erupted on campus when a throng of students was observed chasing after “students they thought were in the video,” according to the report. Administrators obtained the video — a seven-second snippet of the girl and her alleged rapist behind a closed stall door.

The vice principal told OCR investigators they were able to identify the girl and the boy by their shoes visible in the video.

When interviewed by administrators, the girl referred to her alleged attacker as her boyfriend and said the sex was consensual. Separately, the boy told the same story. The girl said she and the boy had prearranged to meet in the restroom at 10:40 a.m.

Administrators suspended all of the involved students — including the alleged victim — for two to five days. The boy and girl seen on the video were disciplined for “committing an obscene act in the school restroom.” The other three students were suspended for cyberbullying, according to the report.

Title IX violations

School and district administrators, according to the report, did not follow federal civil rights mandates for investigating complaints of sex-based harassment after the girl’s mother reported the alleged rape to the school on Oct. 13. She reported her daughter was raped both by the boy seen in the restroom stall as well as the boy who recorded the video. Her daughter did not report she was raped because she was scared and feared retaliation, the report said.

Although school police were called to investigate, district records do not show any further action was taken in response to the mother’s report, and school administrators did not immediately inform the district’s Title IX coordinator, Mike Medina, of the mother’s complaint, according to the report.

Additionally, the mother was not immediately informed of the procedure for filing a formal complaint, per Title IX regulations, and was not provided a complaint form in Spanish. It delayed her ability to file a complaint for nearly a month.

When the mother finally did meet with Medina to file a formal complaint on Nov. 8 — 26 days after she reported her daughter’s  alleged rape — Medina had to translate for her, typing up her complaint in English as she dictated it to him in Spanish, according to the report.

As a result, the mother’s complaint contained minimal details about the encounter and omitted pertinent facts, including those from a medical report she provided to Medina noting “findings that may be caused by abuse,” as well as information about the other involved students and the video recordings.

Lawsuit filed

Gary Dordick, a lawyer representing the alleged victim and her mother, filed a lawsuit in San Bernardino Superior Court in September 2023 alleging negligence, dangerous conditions on public property and harassment. He did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“Plaintiff was violently and sexually attacked, abused and raped by the subject rapists,” according to the lawsuit.

When the girl and her mother reported the incident to then-Principal Morales, he told them that, after viewing the video, he did not believe the girl was raped and suspended her, according to the lawsuit.

“Defendants … were negligently and recklessly violating their duties” to supervise, protect and control the students of Cesar Chavez Middle School, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims the girl began to struggle with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, learning disabilities and thoughts of suicide after the alleged rape, and the district provided her no medical attention in its aftermath. Nor did the district do anything to stop the girl’s ongoing harassment, have the videos removed from social media, or evaluate the girl for an individualized education program upon her mother’s request.

Figueroa said the girl, now 13, is attending another middle school in the district.

No charges after police investigation

Figueroa said the girl’s mother took her daughter to Loma Linda University Medical Center when the school refused to provide her medical attention after the rape complaint was filed. There, a doctor called San Bernardino school police, who in turn contacted the San Bernardino Police Department to conduct the rape investigation.

A sexual assault response team that contracts with the San Bernardino Police Department examined the girl and found evidence consistent with sexual abuse, namely injury to her anal area, according to the medical report. The case was turned over to the District Attorney’s Office, San Bernardino police Capt. Nelson Carrington said.

The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office declined to file criminal charges on Dec. 6, 2023, District Attorney Jason Anderson said.

The case presented several issues for prosecutors, including the fact that both the girl and the boy said the sex was consensual. The day prior to the incident, the two had a conversation on the instant messaging platform Discord about meeting up in the school restroom the next day to “explore their curiosity about sex,” Anderson said.

However, the girl, according to Anderson, also told the investigating officer she was nervous at the time of the incident and did not think things would go as far as they did.

Anderson said there was no evidence the girl had been sexually assaulted by the boy who recorded the incident on video, as the girl’s mother alleged.

Additionally, Anderson said the video snippet showed only the legs and feet of the boy and girl, who appeared to be engaged in oral sex behind the closed restroom stall door.

The girl’s Discord conversation with the boy, Anderson said, reportedly occurred on a school-issued tablet. When the investigating officer requested it from the girl’s mother, he said, she told the detective the device had not worked for a couple of weeks and that she was unable to locate it.

The boy declined to give a statement to police, and there was no indication in the detective’s report that an attempt was made to obtain his school-issued tablet, or any other electronic device he may have used to communicate with the girl on Discord, Anderson said.

His office also grappled with the fact that both the boy and the girl, because they were both under the age of 14, were equally complicit in engaging in illegal sex acts under the law, so prosecutors would have to give equal consideration to criminally charging the girl, Anderson said.

“There is no such thing as consensual sex for anyone under the age of 14. It’s considered a serious felony,” he said.

Given the evidence his office was working with, Anderson said prosecutors declined to file charges.

Expert weighs in

Dr. Roy Lubit, a child psychiatrist licensed in California and New York who consults nationally on child sexual abuse, said child sexual assault investigations require an investigator skilled at interviewing children, making them comfortable and asking pertinent questions.

“It is not uncommon for sexual assault victims, especially children, to deny they were abused out of fear of retaliation, guilt and shame, and it frequently requires multiple interviews before they are able to open up and share what happened to them,” Lubit said.

“Sometimes you have to interview kids multiple times and get them comfortable, and then they’ll talk,” he said. “Children often blame themselves and feel shame when they are victims. They start asking ‘Why was I there? What are other people going to say? Why didn’t I fight back?’ “

He said punishing a child for sexual activity before determining if it was fully voluntary risks punishing a victim, which causes emotional trauma.

District responds

The school district issued a statement saying that “due to ongoing litigation, we are limited in what we can share” about the reported assault.

“Still, we want to emphasize that SBCUSD is committed to fostering a safe and supportive learning environment,” the statement said. “We continue carefully reviewing the findings to ensure that any necessary steps are taken to strengthen our policies, training and procedures. SBCUSD remains dedicated to fostering trust and accountability within our school community.”

Last month, the district adopted a resolution to provide, upon review and approval from the OCR, a guidance memorandum to district employees and contractors on what they must do if they witness or otherwise learn of sex-based harassment of a student by another student, who to report it to and who is responsible for investigating.

The resolution, signed by Superintendent Mauricio Arellano on Nov. 21, outlines the district’s plan to promptly notify students, parents and guardians who report sexual harassment or sexual assault on how the district’s grievance procedure works, with an assurance they will receive a written notice of the outcome and findings of investigations.

Additionally, the district will provide live or prerecorded training on Title IX policies and grievance procedures to employees and contractors.

The oil refiner, which federal attorneys claim failed to report violations to authorities, is charged with two counts of negligently violating the Clean Water Act and four counts of knowingly violating the 52-year-old federal law designed to regulate pollution in US waterways, according to documents filed in federal court in Los Angeles.

Phillips 66 is expected to be arraigned in the coming weeks in US District Court in downtown Los Angeles, U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said on a conference call Thursday. No company executives with the Houston-based energy giant were named in the indictment, which was returned by a grand jury on Nov. 20.

If convicted of all charges, Phillips 66 would face a statutory maximum sentence of five years’ probation on each count and up to $2.4 million in total fines.

As explained by Estrada, there are any number of probationary conditions a judge can place on a company to ensure compliance with the Clean Water Act, though he offered no examples. A company on probation faces heightened scrutiny by regulators and must demonstrate compliance to avoid further penalties, even if the business no longer has a presence in California.

The US Environmental Protection Agency is also investigating the dumping allegations.

“With these charges, we are sending a message. Corporations and individuals need to take their duties to protect the environment seriously,” Estrada said.

Neither a spokesman with Phillips 66 nor LA City Councilman Tim McOsker, whose district includes the Wilmington area, responded to phone calls or emails on Thursday.

Estrada characterized the Phillips 66 indictment — two felonies and four misdemeanor charges — as “not common for our office.”

The Phillips 66 indictment is the first time since 2001 that the US Attorney’s office has brought a felony Clean Water Act case, a spokesman with Estrada’s office said.

In that case, the former LA-based Texaco Refining and Marketing unit pleaded guilty to two felony violations of the Clean Water Act and was fined $4 million. Texaco, which was later bought by Chevron Corp., also admitted that its employees knowingly discharged wastewater, which contained oil and grease above permitted levels, into the Dominguez Channel from a Texaco refinery in the southern part of LA County.

The Phillips indictment comes a month after the Houston-based oil giant announced plans to close refineries in Carson and Wilmington and idle 600 employees and 300 contractors. The company also hired a pair of real estate firms to develop potential uses for the land.

Estrada said his office and other authorities investigating the alleged discharges in November 2020 and February 2021, believe most of the wastewater was caught at the Joint Water Pollution Control Plant in Carson, which is owned by the LA County Sanitation Districts, before reaching the ocean.

LACSD technicians performing routine testing and maintenance at the Carson treatment plant uncovered discharges in two separate incidents, in addition to smelling the oil and grease wafting in the air, according to Estrada.

As outlined by Estrada, the two dumping incidents included the following:

On Nov. 24, 2020, staff at the treatment plant in Carson found that Phillips 66 discharged more than 310,000 gallons of wastewater with 64,000 pounds of oil and grease into the county’s sewage system over a two-and-a-half-hour period. That was more than 300 times the concentration of oil and grease permitted.  The following month, a Phillips 66 manager acknowledged in a letter to Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts that his company made the non-compliant industrial wastewater discharge, noting that the company would “retrain operations personnel” to make sure this didn’t happen again.

Just a few months later, a second incident was discovered by LACSD staff at the Carson sewage plant. On Feb. 8. 2021, the Carson refinery discharged 480,000 gallons of wastewater, which contained at least 33,700 pounds of oil and grease, into the county’s sewer system, over a five-and-a-half-hour period.

In both cases, Estrada said the illegal discharges of oil and grease were likely not dumped into the Pacific Ocean. “We believe the county caught all of the contaminated wastewater,” Estrada said.

The cleanup effort was aided by microbial bugs that eat waste products before the discharges were released into the ocean, according to Estrada.

Polluted land

Since Phillips 66 announced plans to close its Los Angeles area refineries, the Los Angeles Water Quality Board has raised concerns about polluted land on the 650 acres that make up the Wilmington and Carson complex, an industrial backbone near the Port of Los Angeles.

Last month, Phillips 66 hired two development firms to envision what could be built on the sprawling complex dating to the early 1900s. A labyrinth of pipes, tanks and an assortment of machinery processes crude oil into gasoline, kerosene and jet fuel. The energy company hired Catellus Development Corp. in Oakland and Deca Cos. in Sacramento to help figure out its next steps.

Experts previously said remediation of the heavily polluted industrial site could take years, as Phillips has processed oil here for a century. The starkest assessment of the pollution on the site came from the water quality board.

In an emailed statement, the board wrote that “significant amounts of contamination” exist on the 650 acres that make up Phillips 66 refinery sites in Wilmington and Carson, and that it will probably take “years to clean up” the soil and groundwater.

Christopher Damien is reporting about law enforcement in Southern California’s inland and desert communities as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

Alicia Upton paced the concrete floor of her jail cell. She looked around the cramped quarters. Then she pressed the alert button on an intercom attached to the wall.

“What is your emergency?” responded a voice, captured on video footage from a camera in the cell. It was a deputy about 50 feet away, in the control room of the women’s mental health unit where Upton, 21, was being held.

“It’s not an emergency, but —” she began, then the deputy cut off the call before she could finish. Charged with a misdemeanor, Upton was awaiting a court-ordered evaluation to determine whether she was competent to stand trial.

She took a few more listless steps, the video shows. She paused beneath a buzzing fluorescent light, then picked up a white bedsheet and said, “It’s time to hang myself.”

She was found, limp, 20 minutes later. In the interim, the camera recorded the young woman preparing to end her life. But no guards, who were tasked with monitoring the video feed, noticed until it was too late.

Upton was the first of 19 detainees at Riverside County jails to die in 2022. That total, the highest the department had reported in at least three decades, ranked the jail system among the most lethal in the nation that year.

The deaths, attributed to homicide, overdose, natural causes or suicide, reflected troubling patterns: neglect by jail employees, access to illicit drugs, and cell assignments that put detainees at increased risk of violence or did not allow for close oversight.

The suicides — at least three of the deaths, but most likely four — offer particular insight into some of those institutional problems and lapses, an investigation by The New York Times and The Desert Sun found.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department failed at times to adequately monitor detainees and intervene when they attempted suicide. Guards did not always enforce rules prohibiting detainees with mental illnesses from blocking cell windows and cameras, which hinders the required safety monitoring. The department has often isolated detainees with severe mental illness, which can exacerbate suicidal intentions.

And, the investigation found, the department has omitted pertinent facts about the deaths in communications to the families of the dead and to the public.

The department has assumed no responsibility for these deaths. California’s attorney general last year opened an ongoing civil rights investigation into the increase in deaths in custody, and Riverside County agreed to pay more than $12 million to settle lawsuits linked to detainee deaths going back to 2020. At least a dozen cases are still pending.

Sheriff Chad Bianco did not respond to interview requests or comment on detailed questions about the news organizations’ findings. But on an episode of his podcast this summer devoted to inmate deaths, he said that it can be extremely difficult at times to prevent suicides, and falsely claimed that there had never been any allegation that the department had “somehow done something wrong, or mishandled inmates, or mistreated inmates, or caused their death.”

The president of the deputies’ union declined to comment.

To understand how the suicides occurred, The Times and The Desert Sun interviewed dozens of people including current and former jail employees, relatives of the dead, independent medical examiners and civil rights lawyers. The news organizations also reviewed court documents, including arrest records, detainee medical and mental health records, and department notes on jail housing decisions.

Many of the details in this article have never been publicly reported, including the jail security camera footage reviewed by a reporter — material that is rarely seen by outsiders. The department has not released that footage or a dozen other videos requested by the news organizations under the California Public Records Act.

The suicides strongly suggest that, despite a federal class-action suit a decade ago that exposed deficiencies in mental health treatment in Riverside County jails and resulted in new court-ordered requirements, problems persist.

One detainee in 2022, who told guards that he was suicidal, was cleared after a medical check to return to his cell without any suicide-watch protocol. He was found dead about an hour later. He had been in custody for one day.

Another man, who suffered from schizoaffective disorder, had been mostly segregated from other detainees for two years when he was found hanging, and later died. To conceal his actions, he had covered his cell window and camera without any intervention from guards.

No suicides have been reported for 2023, but earlier this year, a man hanged himself while another detainee tried to alert jail guards but couldn’t get their attention.

That suicide and a separate drug overdose prompted Capt. Alyssa Vernal, then the head of the jail, to warn staff members that they were failing to maintain basic jail operating standards — including some of the same lapses identified years ago by the federal court.

Vernal, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, wrote in an internal email reviewed by the news organizations, “It has become obvious we are not keeping house or following the rules we should be.”

‘Kept saying she was fine’

When she was 19, Alicia Upton hit the road and left everything behind. She piled into a friend’s car in West Virginia and embarked on what would become a cross-country trip.

In an interview, her mother, Nichole Thompson, recalled believing that she was going on a fleeting adventure before settling back home. “She was resolute when she fixed her mind on something,” said Thompson, a librarian who raised Upton and her older sister in the Appalachian town of Lost Creek.

From a young age, Upton was an animal lover who would bring home rabbits and raccoons she hoped to keep as pets. At 14, she sold the Xbox she had gotten for Christmas to buy a horse, which she trained herself. To raise money for the road trip, she sold her four-wheeler and some goats, but not the horse, which she left in the care of a friend.

Upton had shown no signs of mental health problems when she left home, her mother said. She had gone to counseling years earlier after the suicide of a close friend, and her mother felt that she was resilient.

The road trip took Upton to Florida, Texas, and across the country through New Mexico and Arizona. Finally, she called home from Hemet.

She sounded happy, her mother recalled. She said California was beautiful. As the weeks wore on, though, she mentioned the car needed costly repairs and that she was often looking for places to sleep.

“I walked a fine line, trying to coax her to come back, but also let her have her freedom,” Thompson said. While some companions left for new destinations, Upton stayed put.

As the months turned into a year, it became clear to Thompson that her daughter was living on the streets. “She always knew coming home was an option,” Thompson said. “If I pushed her, I felt she would disconnect. She just kept saying she was fine.”

Soon, Thompson became concerned that her daughter might be struggling with drugs. She recalled Upton saying irrational things on the phone, like describing seeing relatives who were thousands of miles away.

Eventually, Upton was arrested twice for minor offenses — shoplifting and trespassing. Both times, she was released. But a third arrest was different.

On April 19, 2022, a woman found Upton on her land in San Jacinto. She later told deputies the young woman appeared to be looking for something. When the landowner found a knife on the ground, the two had a confrontation. Upton left and no one was injured. But she was arrested nearby and charged with possession of drug paraphernalia and making criminal threats, both misdemeanors.

The paper trail of Upton’s incarceration describes her as distraught and combative on arrival at the Robert Presley Detention Center in Riverside. Of the five jails in the county, it is the facility where detainees who need mental health care are most often sent. Reports from the booking note that she did not sign several required documents. One jailer wrote on the signature line that she could not be trusted with a pen.

She was given a mental health rating of “severe” and placed in the women’s mental health housing unit, where each cell was monitored by camera. She was not prescribed any medication. When asked if she had ever attempted suicide, she would not answer.

But, deputies wrote in her file, she said she had “multiple personality disorder” and “stated that she ‘always kinda wanted to die.’”

A surge in jail deaths

Long before Upton was sent to the jail, the sheriff’s department had struggled to treat mental illnesses among the nearly 3,700 detainees it housed on any given day.

In jail and prison systems across the country, the population of people with mental health needs has surged in recent decades. More than half the detainees in California’s jails have such problems, a 2023 study found. As Riverside County’s jails began to operate as de facto mental health facilities, some detainees who claimed mistreatment took action.

Four sued the county in federal court in 2013, in what would become a class action, claiming the department was not providing adequate care.

When a judge ordered experts to inspect the claims, Dr. Bruce Gage, then chief of psychiatry for the Washington State Department of Corrections, found multiple problems. Some detainees were not receiving prescribed medications. Others were being medicated indefinitely on mere suppositions of mental illness. It was unclear whether the call buttons in the cells even worked.

Gage reported that the jails didn’t monitor suicidal detainees who were awaiting transfer to psychiatric facilities. The jails had no protocol in place to transition someone who was no longer considered suicidal into less-restrictive living conditions. Detainees either were in a general population and could be outside their cells for hours a day, or confined for all but 15 to 45 minutes.

“Riverside County jail system is amongst the most restrictive correctional settings I have visited,” Gage wrote. Those struggling with mental illness, he added, are “placed at greater risk of harming themselves under these conditions.”

Based on the reports, in 2016 a judge ordered a remedial plan that included ongoing inspections of the facilities and the threat of court intervention. Gage noted that the department had faced a staffing shortage since the 2009 recession, but emphasized that basic standards of care were required by law.

Sara Norman, one of the plaintiffs lawyers in the case, said the jail had made progress in improving medical care, but less so with mental health care. “We have been concerned for years about the dearth of programming and group and individual therapy for people struggling with mental illness in the jails,” she said.

Meanwhile, the county system experienced an increase in jail deaths over the past decade. Among them was a man in 2020 who had been arrested for drug possession and was to be released with a citation for a later court appearance. Instead, he died after being violently extracted from his jail cell by guards while experiencing symptoms of psychosis. His relatives received $7.5 million this year to settle a lawsuit.

The surge of 19 deaths in 2022 made Riverside County’s rate the second-highest in the state, behind Kern County, which had a much smaller jail population. Among the nation’s 15 largest jail systems, Riverside’s was the second-most deadly, with a rate more than twice that of Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas.

While some people at the jails were serving criminal sentences, most — including those who died by suicide — were detainees awaiting trial or other resolution of their cases.

Robert Robinson, 41, was arrested in September 2022 for trying to cash a fraudulent check at a casino. Because he was a gang dropout, he was considered a likely target of violence and was housed alone.

He told jailers while being booked that he was having suicidal thoughts, according to a lawsuit filed by his relatives. He was placed in a cell without a camera and was not put on suicide watch, records show.

The next day, he told deputies he was suicidal, and he met with a medical provider and a mental health nurse, according to court documents. Both cleared him to return to his cell alone. About an hour later, a deputy discovered he had hanged himself.

Riverside County settled the civil suit with his relatives in August for $1.8 million, with no admission of wrongdoing. His family did not respond to requests for comment.

Aaron Aubrey, 28, had an extensive history of mental illness and violence. During his three-year incarceration awaiting trial on a murder charge, he was housed in a mental health unit. He spent significant time in isolation after he was charged with killing another detainee in 2020.

In December 2022 a guard saw that Aubrey had blocked his window and covered his camera, but took no action, according to the coroner’s report. During another security check 40 minutes later, the detainee was found hanging. He died six days later at a hospital.

And this year, Reynaldo Ramos, 55, hanged himself even as a cell neighbor twice tried to alert guards over the intercom, according to a complaint filed with the county by the man’s relatives. The guards didn’t respond, the complaint said.

The claim attributed that account to an anonymous letter sent to the family’s lawyer and separately to a reporter for The Times and The Desert Sun, containing those closely guarded details. A person who had reviewed jail surveillance video of the unit also described the failed alert efforts.

Ramos, who had been given a mental health rating of severe when admitted to the jail on drug charges, was discovered unresponsive during a routine safety check, according to an internal incident report provided to the Times.

‘Man down!’

In the days after Upton’s arrest, her mind continued to fray.

On April 28, 2022, a judge ordered her to undergo a mental competency evaluation. Her criminal case was suspended, and with it the possibility of bail, until the findings were reported. When she was admitted to the jail, she had briefly been placed in a safety cell, without access to items that could be used for self-harm. Soon after, she was placed in the mental health unit.

That evening, the surveillance video showed, she was restless. Her cellmate was asleep on the top bunk as Upton paced and looked out of the cell door’s window. Meal trays were stacked at the foot of the bed and clothes were scattered nearby.

At 8:13 p.m., she pressed the intercom button, but got only a few words out before the deputy hung up. Moments later, Upton can be heard in the video saying she intends to hang herself.

She looped the bedsheet around her neck and, for a few minutes, tried anchoring it. She smacked her head three times. She looked toward the camera. At one point, it sounded as if she was weeping.

Sitting on the bottom bunk, she tied the sheet above her and tightened it around her neck.

At 8:18 p.m., Upton raised a middle finger to the cell camera. Over the next few minutes, the video captured her final movements. By 8:22, she was still.

It all unfolded in view of the deputies who were supposed to monitor the feed from her cell. A guard at a workstation near the control room was responsible for constantly tracking the video footage of the unit, according to three former jail employees speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the department.

Meanwhile, a deputy in the control room reminded a trainee to occasionally scan the images. They looked up at the feeds from the roughly 40 cameras, two of the former employees said. Spotting Upton, the deputy shouted over the radio, “Man down!”

She had been hanging by the bedsheet for 16 minutes before guards flashed lights signaling an emergency, video footage shows. Two deputies and a jail nurse entered her cell and began resuscitation efforts, but it was futile.

The next morning, back in West Virginia, Upton’s mother woke to pounding on her door, she recalled in an interview. It was a local deputy, who told her to call the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

She remembers asking, “Does this mean she’s dead?”

Yes.

“I thought my heart would stop,” she said.

The sheriff is the coroner

In Riverside County, the final accounting of how people die depends to a large extent on Sheriff Bianco.

A veteran of the department, Bianco was first elected sheriff in 2018. He has cast himself as a right-wing firebrand at odds with the state’s left-leaning legislature and governor. He has also criticized Attorney General Rob Bonta’s investigation of jail deaths as a “political stunt.”

California is one of just three states that allow elected law enforcement officials to oversee coroners’ offices. Until recently in Riverside County, that meant the sheriff’s department typically investigated deaths at its jails while also supervising the pathologists conducting the autopsies. (This year, the department began outsourcing those autopsies.) The final report about the cause of death is signed by the sheriff, who also serves as the coroner.

The state legislature has considered bills to separate the offices but none have passed. The California Medical Association has long advocated a separation, saying that the consolidation of the responsibilities of sheriff and coroner is an “immense conflict of interest.”

The Times and The Desert Sun found discrepancies when comparing the department’s public death summaries of the 2022 suicides against jail records turned over in civil suits, the video of Upton’s death and information provided by current and former employees.

Mario Solis, who had a history of mental illness, was jailed after a scuffle with a grocery store security guard over a stolen bag of Skittles, according to court records. In September 2022, his mother, Sara Solis, was told that he had died alone in a cell — but not much else. About six months later, she received the department’s summary report.

It included findings from an autopsy conducted days after Solis, 31, died in the mental health unit of the jail in Murrieta. Inside his mouth and throat were two pencils, a toothbrush, a plastic cap and bars of soap, the report said. It also noted cut marks on his arms.

A deputy coroner wrote that Solis had “an unspecified mental health history” and had been prescribed two psychiatric medications.

Bianco attributed Solis’s death to suffocation and blood loss after his jugular vein was punctured. He certified the death as an accident.

More than a year later, a lawyer representing the Solis family in a suit against the county received a trove of information the sheriff’s department had not previously disclosed. Jail medical staff had treated Solis for schizophrenia, including with antipsychotic medication. On three occasions, he said he was suicidal and talked about stabbing himself with a pencil.

During a chaotic five-month incarceration, he was transferred 10 times among four county jails and did two stints in intensive psychiatric treatment.

From the start, Solis had pleaded for help and medication, his scribbled notes show: “I am not well. Please help me before things worsen,” one read. In another, he requested a psychiatric visit, which was arranged but later canceled.

On Sept. 2, 2022, Solis was ruled incompetent to stand trial and ordered to a hospital for treatment. The next day, he was found unconscious in his cell. He had lacerations on his wrist and neck, a nurse wrote. His neck was red and bruised. His mouth and nose were bloody.

Photos of the cell show flooding from the toilet that soaked books and trash. One wall was filled with erratic writing.

The department’s reports do not explain why Bianco determined the death was accidental.

Bianco has accused media outlets and advocacy groups of misrepresenting the jail deaths to the public, including on his podcast episode on the topic, which was promoted on the department’s social media channels. Without naming names, the sheriff said that a detainee who had died after swallowing objects, including a pencil, had a “propensity to eat things.”

“They suffocated themselves, basically,” Bianco said. “But we don’t believe it was a suicide.”

In 1,600 pages of jail medical notes, there is no mention of Solis habitually swallowing harmful objects, as the sheriff claimed.

“This is not someone who accidentally died,” Hugo Solis, one of Solis’s brothers, said in an interview. “He killed himself in despair. And the sheriff knows that.”

A forensic pathologist and a medical anthropologist reviewed the coroner’s report for this article. Both said that, aside from the mention of Solis’s psychiatric history and prescriptions, it was unclear whether the coroner staff had reviewed his extensive mental health records or knew about his suicide threats. Both said that information was crucial for determining whether the death was a suicide.

Judy Melinek, a board-certified forensic pathologist, asked, “Why was he left alone and unsupervised after showing severe signs of mental health deterioration?”

‘It was their job’

Thompson, Alicia Upton’s mother, said she was stunned at how little information the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department would share about her daughter’s death.

For weeks, she said, she struggled to learn even basic details about the events leading up to the suicide. She asked to see any reports and obtain any surveillance video, though she wasn’t sure if she could bear to watch it. But the department declined to provide much of the material she requested.

Thompson sued the sheriff’s department last year, saying it had failed to monitor and protect her daughter. In its response, the county denied that deputies had failed to monitor Upton at the time of her suicide. However, according to two former employees, two jail workers faced discipline for lapses.

When a reporter described to  Thompson the footage from the jail cell, she said she had long suspected that her daughter had been desperate for help — but had been ignored.

“It was their job to keep her safe,” Thompson said. “It was their job to monitor her. They didn’t care to do it.”

Justin Mayo and  Ana Facio-Krajcer contributed reporting.  Julie Tate contributed research.

This article was reported in partnership with Big Local News at Stanford University.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Christopher Damien is a reporter focusing on law enforcement and incarceration in California as part of the Local Investigations Fellowship at The Times. More about Christopher Damien