The Brief

It’s been nearly three years since L.A. County received a plan to close the aging downtown Men’s Central Jail. The 145-page proposal called the facility "unsafe, crowded and crumbling."

Now, the county is looking at a possible five-year timeline that community activists say isn’t fast enough.

The five-year timeline presented at this week's board of supervisors meeting calls for 1,200 new mental health and supportive housing beds per year and for the courts to find a way to safely release an additional 7,000 people a year, among other provisions.

Songhai Armstead, executive director of L.A. County’s Justice, Care and Opportunities Department and a retired Superior Court judge, presented the timeline to supervisors.

“I believe personally that the conditions of the Men’s Central Jail are uninhabitable, they are not OK,” Armstead said.

In the past, the county has said it could not safely close the jail without first ensuring that community-based care is in place. For years, groups including Justice LA and Dignity and Power Now have been pushing elected leaders to do just that.

“There is a real roadmap for the county, they just have refused to actually implement it. And they spent years asking for more and more reports and roadmaps,” Janet Asante, of Dignity and Power Now, told LAist.

While Asante is not satisfied with the five-year timeline, she said supervisors’ apparent frustration at the progress on jail closure does give her hope.

Board chair Lindsey Horvath said at the supervisors’ meeting that she wants to see the county move toward a clearer plan on how to close the more than 60-year-old facility.

“In many cases it’s not safe for inmates to be housed there nor our staff to work there as has been stated many times,” Horvath said. “Closing Men’s Central Jail is complex and we have to do it thoughtfully, but we have to do it.”

While population needs are continually in flux, 40% of people incarcerated in the L.A. County jail system have mental health needs based on the latest count in February 2023, according to the sheriff’s department. That’s down from a high of 41% in 2022 and up from 27% in 2017.

Andrew and Suze Lopez of Bakersfield welcomed their newborn son Ryu at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on Aug.18, 2025, against some of the highest medical odds that the couple’s doctors had ever seen.

Suze had an abdominal ectopic pregnancy, in which a fertilized egg develops outside the uterus in the abdomen. According to the team that treated her, the odds of a viable pregnancy developing so far away from Suze’s uterus, let alone with few complications for mother and child, are “far less than one in a million.”

The Lopezes are celebrating the extraordinarily unlikely healthy birth of their newest child thanks to the work of a massive team of specialists and, in part, a well-timed visit to L.A. for a Dodgers game.

“ I credit it all to God of course, because he gave us such a miracle,” Suze told LAist.

Discovering the pregnancy

Suze had long been living with an ovarian cyst that made pregnancy very unlikely, especially because she’d already had her other ovary and cyst removed.

At first, Suze didn’t want to have the growing cyst removed for two reasons. Removing it meant that she would have gone through unwanted hormonal changes due to early menopause, and she was holding onto a sliver of hope that her teenage daughter Kaila might not end up an only child.

“ My daughter was always like, ‘Hey, let's have a brother or sister,’” Suze said. “And I was like, ‘Sorry, just not happening.’ And I kind of just accepted it.”

Suze was finally starting to make plans to have the cyst removed, having “almost given up” on having a second child. At that point the cyst weighed 22 pounds. A routine pregnancy test ahead of a scheduled CT scan came back positive. But Suze, an emergency room nurse herself, knew false positives were possible due to a number of factors. Two more pregnancy tests came back positive. Follow up exams revealed a femur behind her cyst and blood flow in what appeared to be a developing fetus.

At that moment, Suze knew she had a viable pregnancy.

The Dodgers game

Suze broke the good news to Andrew at a Dodgers game. Andrew was just about to start his final semester as a nursing student, and the couple was there to celebrate. (Andrew said it was Aug. 15 — Demon Slayer hat night, for the record.) With Suze’s news, the couple had one more thing to commemorate.

But on that same trip, Suze started to feel abdominal pain — unbeknownst to her at the time, the baby she was carrying was already full term, mostly hidden behind the large cyst.

The couple quickly decided to go to Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

Cedars-Sinai earlier this year became the first hospital in California to be considered a Level IV Maternal Care hospital, the highest level of obstetric and maternal care given by the Joint Commission. And with a case this rare, specialists across several departments were needed to deliver the baby successfully.

The gravity of the situation

Dr. John Ozimek, Cedars-Sinai’s director of labor and delivery, was on call when Suze came into the hospital.

In addition to her abdominal pain, Suze had abnormally high blood pressure as an additional complicating factor. Knowing of Suze’s positive pregnancy test, Ozimek soon set out to get to the bottom of the issues.

“ Finally, I put the probe back way far away, somewhere where you would never see a baby,” said Ozimek. “And I started to see parts of a baby.”

Ozimek first noticed a femur, then the baby’s cranium. He measured the size — and only then did he realize how complicated the situation was about to become.

“I looked at her and I looked at her husband, Andrew, and I said, ‘Guys, you're full term. This is a full term pregnancy,’” he said.

In fact, Ozimek said that Ryu would’ve been well past the due date doctors would’ve given Suze if she had exhibited any symptoms of pregnancy.

Ozimek credited the Lopezes’ trusting attitude, and their knowledge of the medical profession, with helping the doctors conduct each test and procedure smoothly.

“ I am extremely grateful to her and to Andrew for putting their trust in us, not knowing who we were and essentially recommending this really risky and extreme surgery in less than 24 hours of meeting her,” Ozimek said.

With the extremely precarious surgery on the books, neonatal intensive care unit experts, anesthesiologists, and nurse practitioners, among others, then jumped into action.

The birth

Delivering a full-term abdominal ectopic pregnancy is exceedingly rare, and the team at Cedars-Sinai and the Lopezes had to think through all the contingencies before the operation.

“If we saw distress, we would do an emergency delivery and get the baby out,” Ozimek said. “Under most circumstances, that's OK. But in this circumstance, that would put her life in extreme danger.”

Because of the complexity of the procedure, doctors made the decision to put Suze under general anesthesia, which is generally not recommended. And so the work began.

First, Suze’s cyst was removed to allow doctors to access the baby. And even though Ozimek knew roughly what to expect beneath the cyst, he was still floored.

“ What we saw in there was just something you will never see in your life as a maternal fetal medicine specialist or as an obstetrician,” Ozimek said. “It's this eight pound baby — more than 8 pounds — laying directly in her abdomen. The head was up directly underneath the spleen. His little bottom was resting on top of her very tiny unpregnant uterus.”

Doctors quickly lifted Ryu out and began taking care of other tasks, like removing the placenta from Suze’s abdomen.

Suze started to hemorrhage blood during the intensive procedure, which Ozimek said the team had anticipated. Surgeons worked to control the bleeding, and anesthesiologists jumped in to give her blood transfusions to keep Suze stable. She lost 4.7 liters of blood all told, according to Ozimek, almost her whole blood volume.

Since Ryu was born without fluid in his amniotic sac, his lung development was a major concern. As the effects of the anesthesia wore off, Ryu proved to be a feisty, vocal baby. Doctors removed his breathing tube less than 24 hours after putting it in, and he continued to exhibit promising signs throughout the whole time he was in the ICU.

Against all odds, the delivery went off as planned without any major complications. Even Suze bounced back quickly from her procedure so she could focus on spending time with her surprise.

“ People use the word miracle and all the time for different things, and I don't — I mean, it's just who I am, I don't,” Ozimek said. “This is as close to it as I can imagine it, it really is. I think about it all the time.”

Post operation

The Lopezes named their baby Ryu for two reasons. The name pays tribute to former Dodgers pitcher Hyun-jin Ryu — a nod to where Andrew found out about the pregnancy — and also the Street Fighter character Ryu, a nod to the spirit and tenacity that his parents felt he had demonstrated.

“He fought through all these odds and it's just unbelievable,” Andrew said. “ We thought it was very fitting for him to have a fighter name and to also match where I found out we were gonna have this wonderful miracle.”

Ryu stayed in the care of neonatologists at Cedars-Sinai for about two weeks then recovered with Suze at the nearby Ronald McDonald House. After making the drive back and forth from Bakersfield in order to complete his last semester, Andrew celebrated his graduation from nursing school last week.

In the months since Ryu’s birth on Aug. 18, Suze, Andrew, Ryu and Kaila have been able to fall into a new rhythm as a family of four as they get ready to celebrate their first holidays together.

“ I think of life so differently,” Suze said. “I just appreciate everything — everything. Even if it's the baby crying, because that just means that his lungs work, they function, they can breathe.”

Marguerita Elementary School teacher Claudia Ralston spends most of her day on the floor, guiding her transitional kindergarten students through play. She said if it weren’t for TK, the Alhambra educator would be considering retirement.

“Yes, I am exhausted,” Ralston said. “But just being here for the children and doing all the different activities … their curiosity, them wanting to learn just gives you that extra energy.”

This school year is the first where every 4-year-old in the state can enroll in the universal preschool program, also called TK, at their local public school. Schools need to hire an estimated 12,000 teachers to staff the program. Some may come from child care settings and preschool programs, but others are veteran educators who’ve gone back to school to get the credential required to teach TK.

And once they get into the TK classroom, many educators told us, they’ve found new joy in the work.

Lauren Bush started teaching transitional kindergarten three years ago after more than two decades coaching other educators and teaching every grade from kindergarten through sixth.

Her classroom at Lucille J. Smith Elementary in Lawndale is broken into different “centers,” where students can play with colorful magnetic tiles, practice painting their name or construct a ramp to roll a ball from one end of the room to the other.

“It was just so joyful to be with the kids again,” Bush said. “That's when I just, like, got back to myself as an educator, and now I'm gonna die here. That's my plan. I love it here.”

Education research shows that teachers who like their jobs are more likely to stay, and that stability can be good for long-term learning outcomes.

So we wanted to understand what makes TK so joyful for educators and how that can shape how and what students learn.

Lauren Bush and her students practice saying the sounds associated with the letter 'A' at Lucille J. Smith Elementary in Lawndale.

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Mariana Dale

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Welcoming students with joy

Broadly, the goal of transitional kindergarten is to prepare students for kindergarten and beyond.

“I wanna make sure that their first experience in a public school setting is one that is joyful, where they feel loved, where they feel welcomed, where they get to really transition nicely into like the rigor of the school,” Bush said.

California’s learning foundations for preschool and transitional kindergarten include academic concepts, like the alphabet and writing, but also learning about emotions and developing kids’ muscles.

“The progress in academics in the lower grades is so satisfying because it's such a huge, huge jump,” Bush said. “You don't necessarily see that in the upper grades. It's so gradual… They come into me not knowing how to hold a pencil, and they leave writing their name and drawing.”

That’s why Bush has her students tear paper, to hone the fine motor skills that will be useful to one day using a pencil.

“Yes, they're playing all day, but it's very intentional play,” Bush said.

Teachers also told us without the pressure of standardized testing, there was flexibility to tailor their instruction to students’ interests.

“I can take something that they're curious about and go from there and do little mini lessons with that,” said Alhambra TK teacher Claudia Ralston.

For example, when she noticed a group of students was ready to practice writing, she set up the materials for them to make signs. The subject of the signs, pumpkin pies and pumpkin drinks, was a topic they’d previously expressed interest in.

And while every school is different, she said in her experience, there are also fewer worksheets used in TK than other grades.

“Before, we used to have to run off a lot of copies,” Ralston said. “We're not doing that. It's all hands on.”

Samantha Elliott, a first-year TK teacher at Price Elementary School in Downey, said she starts the year focused on friendship and manners.  "If [the students] don't feel safe or welcome, then there's really no learning going on there," Elliott said.

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Pacific Oaks College professor Jorge Ramirez said this approach is a key part of effective early childhood education.

“ We're not dictating what they should learn, how they should learn in or in the manner that they should learn it,” Ramirez said. “It's more of us really understanding what the child wants and what they need.”

At Price Elementary in Downey, Samantha Elliot’s TK classroom features “wiggle breaks” between lessons, and students learn a physical action with each letter of the alphabet.

“It's incorporating instruction and kind of the movement to help bridge the gap a little bit and get them moving, but also still learning,” Elliot said.

And classes are also smaller. Kindergarten classes can have up to 33 students, but California requires that a school’s average TK class have no more than 24 students, and there must be one adult for every 10, which means teachers also have help from aides.

In Bush’s class, teacher assistant Maria Estrada often sets up activities and works 1-on-1 with students, including those learning English.

“ My goal is to help those students that need that extra support, so they can catch up at the end of the day,” Estrada said.

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All four-year-olds in the state of California now have access to a free preschool program in their local school district. So what does transitional kindergarten offer kids and what are the challenges in its implementation? In this episode of Imperfect Paradise, we break it down with the LAist education team.

California's new public preschool program for 4-year-olds: Exploring transitional kindergarten

All four-year-olds in the state of California now have access to a free preschool program in their local school district. So what does transitional kindergarten offer kids and what are the challenges in its implementation? In this episode of Imperfect Paradise, we break it down with the LAist education team.

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Does the joy of TK last?

Susan Moore Johnson has studied teaching for decades and leads the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project on the Next Generation of Teachers.

One frequently cited study she led found that teachers’ satisfaction with their working conditions predicted how long they’d stay in the classroom and their students’ performance on standardized tests.

Three main factors teachers mentioned were the opportunity to collaborate with skilled colleagues, a safe and orderly school and a supportive principal who understands teaching.

“ The idea of working with kids who really need good teachers is very attractive to people,” Johnson said. “But they can't do it in a place that's disjointed and chaotic and doesn't have curriculum materials.”

Marissa Mateo started teaching TK in the 2010s in the San Fernando Valley. Early on, her principal supported her participation in an L.A. County program where a substitute covered her class about once a month so that she could attend in-person training, meetings and observe educators in other districts.

Lucille J. Smith Elementary School Principal Cristal Moore said it's not uncommon for her to end a stressful day in one of the school's TK classrooms. "It's a very joyful place to be," she said. "It almost grounds you. Restores you in a very positive way."

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Mariana Dale

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Students learn how to balance and run during their second recess at Marguerita Elementary School in Alhambra.

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Elly Yu

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 ”I still talk to several of the teachers that were in my group,” Mateo said.

She’s continued to refine her craft. This year, for example, she’s incorporating more “loose parts” into her classroom. The idea is to let students create with random odds-and-ends like corks, gems and wooden shapes rather than instructing them to build a specific object.

While Mateo’s instruction at Noble Avenue Elementary may evolve, she says her students’ enthusiasm is a constant.

“For the most part, nobody's coming in with a negative experience in school because they're just starting,” Mateo said.  “They may be having a negative feeling like crying because they miss their parents. But other than that, they haven't developed any kind of bad feelings about school.”

That’s why every year, she has the same message on her classroom bulletin board: “Welcome to TK, the happiest place to learn.”

An East Hollywood nursing home that nearly lost its license this year because of repeated state citations for deaths of residents at the facility was cited again last month after another person died.

The California Department of Public Health cited Brier Oak on Sunset after a 92-year-old resident bled to death on Sept. 27. Staff members had continued injecting her with blood thinners over a 40-hour period in violation of clinical guidelines.

It’s an AA citation, the most severe the department issues when violations of care standards are determined to be a substantial factor in someone’s death. The facility faces a $120,000 fine.

These kinds of citations are rare. The department has recently issued, on average, fewer than 20 AA citations yearly across more than 1,200 skilled nursing facilities in California.

Brier Oak has received three AA citations for patient deaths since late 2022.

State regulations require authorities to suspend or revoke the licenses of any facilities that get two AA citations within a period of 24 months.

The state Public Health Department began that process with Brier Oak in May based on resident deaths in 2022 and 2024. But officials dropped that effort later because they say they determined the two patient deaths had occurred 26 months apart — just outside of the two-year window.

A spokesperson for the company that owns Brier Oak told LAist it has appealed the first two citations and is considering whether to appeal the third.

Advocates for nursing home residents say the recent death could have been avoided if the state had taken action.

“There were red flags, and a lot of these red flags existed prior to the death of this poor resident,” said Tony Chicotel, senior staff attorney with  California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.

The state said Brier Oak has until Dec. 19 to notify the department if it intends to appeal.

What led to the patient deaths?

In the recent death at Brier Oak cited by the state, multiple communication and technical failures by nursing staff led to the patient bleeding out over a period of 40 hours, according to the citation.

The 92-year-old patient was immobile and had been prescribed a blood thinner called heparin to help prevent blood clots from forming. But once a patient is bleeding, those injections make bleeding worse, and potentially fatal.

When nursing staff found bright red blood in the resident’s diaper the day before she died, Brier Oak failed to follow established processes for documenting the bleeding or communicating it to a nurse practitioner or medical doctor, according to the citation.

Nurses told state authorities they delayed informing physicians because they “get mad” when contacted in the middle of the night.

The facility’s staff also failed to fully assess the patient to determine the possible causes of the bleeding and or to properly monitor the issue during crucial periods, according to the citation.

She suffered four internal bleeding episodes over 40 hours and continued to receive blood thinner injections.

The citation says a nurse practitioner at Brier Oak told state licensing authorities later that if she’d been informed about the patient’s ongoing bleeding, she would have stopped the blood thinner and sent her to a hospital.

In 2022, Brier Oak received a AA citation after a 62-year-old woman died from respiratory failure in part because nurses hadn’t been trained to operate her breathing machine.

In 2024, the nursing home got another AA citation. This time, a 63-year-old woman with paraplegia and severe obesity fell from her bed and died while a nursing assistant was changing her. The assistant was alone, even though the woman’s care plan required two staff members.

Who owns Brier Oak?

Brier Oak on Sunset is primarily owned by Genesis Healthcare, a publicly-traded nursing home operator that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July.

Once the largest nursing home operator in the U.S., Genesis was facing billions in debt when it declared bankruptcy, according to court filings. That includes millions in potential damages from lawsuits related to patient care failures.

In a brief statement to LAist, a company spokesperson said it's still considering whether or not to appeal the recent citation at Brier Oak.

The citation should trigger a suspension or revocation of the facility's license, according to state regulations. The latter means it would have to close its doors. The two most recent deaths and citations at the facility occurred within the two-year window.

The California Department of Public Health confirmed it cited Brier Oak on Nov. 26.

The department said the facility submitted a required written response before a Dec. 6 deadline, showing how it will fix the problems and prevent them from happening again..

The department determined Brier Oak was back in compliance during an onsite visit last week, a representative told LAist.

Brier Oak on Sunset currently houses about 150 patients, according to state records.

A bankruptcy judge has stalled the proposed sale of Genesis Healthcare to an affiliate of one of its investors.

Experts say it’s unclear whether the state would revoke the license of an owner who is actively trying to sell and turn over operations to someone else.

It’s been a rough start to ski and snowboard season for California mountain towns. Snowfall is well below average, but Christmas could come with some of the white stuff. Here's where things stand:

Hmmm. Didn’t we just have a record storm?

Yes. That big atmospheric river that hit Southern California last month made it one of the wettest Novembers on records. But since then, it’s been unusually warm and dry, which is not good for mountain towns that depend on snow, and the outdoor enthusiasts that flock to them.

How bad is it?

California’s snowpack is about 20% of normal for this time of the year, according to the state’s snow-tracking website. Southern California isn’t quite as bad off — we’ve gotten about half our normal snowfall so far.

As for the resorts, only about 20% of the terrain at Bear Mountain in Big Bear is open. About 35% of Mammoth Mountain is open.

Can’t they just make snow?

They are, but the unusually warm temperatures have curbed resorts’ ability to make enough snow to open more terrain. “If you're blowing water into 40-degrees, it's going to stay water,” said Justin Kanton, a spokesperson for Big Bear Mountain Resort. “ So as much as people probably would want us to just crank the snow guns all day, every day up here and just get things moving, that's not really possible.”

But there’s a silver lining!

The dry weather has allowed Caltrans to make good progress toward opening Highway 38, said Evan Engle, who chairs the board of the Big Bear Chamber of Commerce. The road typically handles up to 40% of traffic up to the mountain town, Engle said. But it’s been closed since September when it got washed out by Tropical Storm Mario.

Getting it open as soon as possible is key to keeping visitor traffic manageable, and getting supplies to Big Bear.

What’s the snow outlook?

SoCal mountains are likely to see some precipitation around Christmas, said Kyle Wheeler, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. But with temperatures not expected to drop much, it’s uncertain how much of it will be white, Wheeler said.

If you go to Big Bear: 

• If you plan to hit the slopes, get on it early, when the snow is at its best given the warm conditions. 
• No snow? There’s more to do than ski and snowboard. Check this list of winter fun events.  
• Worried about traffic? Consider going up earlier in the week. If you can’t do that, consider taking Highway 18 through Lucerne Valley. It’s a longer route if you’re coming from L.A., but less traveled, and less likely to make you car sick (fewer tight curves).