The Brief

Investigators said Friday that they reviewed statements from more than 60 witnesses and other evidence before charging a Moorpark man in the death of Paul Kessler, a Jewish man who was fatally injured last week during a confrontation between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine demonstrators in Thousand Oaks.

Loay Alnaji, a 50-year-old college professor, was charged with two felony counts: involuntary manslaughter and battery causing serious bodily injury. The charges come with special allegations that Alnaji personally inflicted great bodily injury on Kessler.

Alnaji pleaded not guilty in Superior Court Friday afternoon. If convicted, he could face time in prison. A judge reduced Alnaji's bail to $50,000 from $1 million, and ordered him to turn over any passports.

Defense lawyer Ron Bamieh objected, arguing that Alnaji isn't a flight risk and has no criminal record.

“He’s an American citizen [and] he deserves to be treated like an American citizen. And to act like he’s some kind of flight threat... is ludicrous,” Bamieh said outside the courthouse.

Bamieh indicated he has seen video on social media that may shed more light on both Kessler's and Alnaji's behavior.

“At the most this is a push, somebody fell, and something tragic happened,” Bamieh said. 

On Friday morning, Ventura County's sheriff and district attorney held a joint news conference where they explained the progress of the ongoing investigation.

District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said investigators obtained nine search warrants, all of which were approved within 24 hours of Kessler’s death the morning of Nov. 6. He said prosecutors in his office began reviewing the witness statements and more than 600 pieces of evidence.

He did not identify the evidence or specify what any of the witnesses said.

Collectively, the Sheriff's Department and the DA’s Office spent more than 2,000 hours on the case before it was filed, according the county authorities.

“We took this case seriously, and we investigated it and charged it thoroughly,” Nasarenko said, adding that authorities approached the case “with an open mind” and did not proceed as though criminal charges would be “a forgone conclusion.”

“Our charge and task as prosecutors is to follow the facts, follow the evidence and adhere to the rule of law,” he said.

According to the sheriff’s office, the incident was reported about 3:20 p.m. on Nov. 5 at the intersection of Westlake Boulevard and Thousand Oaks Boulevard, where demonstrators had gathered in rival protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

Kessler, a 69-year-old Thousand Oaks resident, was injured and fell to the ground, hitting his head. He was bleeding, but conscious and responsive when sheriff’s deputies arrived. He died at a hospital hours later.

Ventura County Dist. Atty Erik Nasarenko addresses the media on Nov. 17, 2023.

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Robert Garrova

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LAist

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Ventura County Chief Medical Examiner Christopher Young has said Kessler’s injuries caused swelling and bleeding around his brain.

During the news conference, the district attorney noted that his office did not file a murder charge against Alnaji because there is no evidence that he arrived at the intersection “with the intent to kill, harm or injure anyone.” So far, Nasarenko added, no hate crime allegations have been filed, but they have not been ruled out.

Nasarenko explained that in addition to the battery charge, Alnaji faces a count of involuntary manslaughter, meaning he is accused of killing a person with criminal negligence, “specifically reckless conduct that carried with it a high risk of death or great bodily injury.“

When considering the charges, he said, prosecutors relied on physical and forensic evidence, as well as “findings regarding the injuries to the left side of Paul Kessler’s face.” Nasarenko said investigators were able to put together video and digital footage to recreate the sequence of events leading to the confrontation.

Detectives and prosecutors are still seeking information from witnesses and asking anyone with video of the incident to come forward.

During the Friday news conference, Nasarenko said Kessler worked for decades in medical sales and was a pilot. He said Kessler was married for 43 years and leaves behind a son. 

Tickets to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles will go on sale Thursday.

The much-anticipated drop is the first opportunity to get seats at Olympic events, including the opening and closing ceremonies — and it's for locals only. The sale will be open to those who pre-registered to buy tickets, and not everyone will be chosen. Fans will be randomly selected and given a time slot to buy tickets.

Fans with eligible Southern California or Oklahoma City ZIP codes will be notified via email if they're selected for a slot to buy tickets in the pre-sale, which runs April 2 to 6. After that, fans from around the world will have their first chance to get tickets from April 9 to 19.

Those who are chosen from the draw will be notified 48 hours ahead of their time slot to buy tickets online, and will have two days to select and purchase their tickets. That means people will know as early as Tuesday if they've been selected to buy tickets.

Each fan can snag up to 12 tickets, and an additional 12 tickets to the Olympic soccer tournament. Tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies are limited to four per person.

If you aren't chosen for the first ticket drop, there will be more in the months to come. Plus, come 2027 there will be a re-sale market for tickets.

How the draw works

If you get an email that you've been selected to buy Olympics tickets, it will include the time window you have to purchase tickets and a link to the website where you can buy them.

You'll have 48 hours to buy tickets, but LA28 recommends logging in as soon as you can to get the best ticket options. Once tickets are in your cart, you'll have 30 minutes to buy them.

LA28 warned fans that they could encounter online queues when buying tickets. Some people reported this when registering for tickets, too.

The ticket site will allow fans to search events by sport, venue and location. Once you choose an event, you'll book in a seating category — but actual seat numbers will be assigned later on.

Fans who want to game out their purchases ahead of time can look at the competition schedule here.

If you purchase tickets in the locals pre-sale, the billing address for the card you buy the tickets with will need to have one of the qualifying local ZIP codes. Here in Southern California, that includes people in L.A., Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

Prices

Prices for Olympics tickets will vary widely. The cheapest tickets will be $28 a pop, with the priciest tickets upwards of $1,000, according to Olympic organizers.

The majority of tickets to the Olympic Games will run into triple digits. According to LA28, half the tickets will be more than $200 and around 5% of tickets will be more than $1,000. In total, there will be 14 million tickets available across the Olympics and Paralympics.

What exactly different events will cost — and how expensive tickets might get — isn't clear yet. An example in a Youtube explainer posted by LA28 showed ticket options for Track and Field preliminary competitions at the Coliseum ranging from $28 to $1,035.65.

According to the video, there will also be standing room-only tickets for some events.

Tickets to the Paralympic Games will go on sale next year.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The Koreatown Senior & Community Center is bringing back its free lunch program for seniors, this time with its longest guaranteed run yet.

The center is partnering with the YMCA under a two-year agreement, which would allow the program — for the first time — to run continuously for that long. In the past, the center’s free lunch program typically lasted only a few months at a time before funding cuts forced it to scale back or stop temporarily.

If all goes as planned, the program is expected to relaunch by late April.

“We’re committed to identifying funding beyond the two years,” said Mario Valenzuela, chief mission advancement officer at the YMCA. 

The program is returning as meal services for seniors across L.A. face ongoing funding challenges. In September, LA Public Press reported that some senior centers were cutting back on meals as pandemic-era funding expired and longer-term funding looked uncertain. Valenzuela said that across the YMCA’s 29 food distribution sites in the county, seniors now make up the majority of those seeking assistance.

The YMCA was awarded $7.5 million last year to address food insecurity, and Valenzuela said the Koreatown senior lunch program is one way those funds are being used.

The center launched its free lunch program in January 2024 with about 200 meals a day, funded by the city’s Department of Aging. But the number of meals steadily declined, from 200 to 50, before the program ended in early January.

Hyun-ok Lee, president of the board of the Koreatown Senior & Community Center, said the sudden halt was difficult for people who had come to rely on the meals.

“When the meal service suddenly stopped, a lot of seniors and people in the community really felt it,” Lee said.

After the program stopped, the center began looking for new funding sources. That effort eventually led to a connection with the YMCA, facilitated by Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez, according to both the center and the YMCA.

“It was important for the Assemblymember to ensure that meals are culturally sensitive, especially for the seniors in our district, so we were able to connect the YMCA with KSCC and reinstitute the daily distribution of Korean lunch boxes at KSCC,” Nina Suh-Toma, Gonzalez’s field representative, said. 

Valenzuela said the organization stepped in after hearing from multiple senior centers that funding for services was being cut.

The Koreatown senior center’s free lunch program will cost between $210,000 and $250,000 a year and will initially provide 100 meals a day from Monday to Friday, with the goal of eventually increasing that number to 200.

Valenzuela said the program is part of a broader shift at the YMCA to work more directly in communities. 

“We can no longer just focus within our four walls,” he said. “We really have to meet the community where they’re at.”

The YMCA and the center are still working out the details of the partnership, including how meals will be distributed. Valenzuela said they’re currently looking for a food vendor that can provide Korean meals that are both culturally appropriate and meet nutritional guidelines.

Valenzuela said he’s already seeing growing demand for these services. 

“I think the emerging need is there are a lot of cuts coming down the pipeline particularly to social services and the most vulnerable population right now are seniors,” he said. “We’re seeing it across L.A. County.”

One of the many tools of the farmworker movement in the 1960s was Teatro Campesino, a traveling theater troupe that told the plight of the farmworkers through “actos,” or short skits.

It was a mostly male-dominated space until a group of Chicanas came together to tell the stories of women who were also part of the civil rights and farmworker movement.

Teatro Chicana was the product of Felicitas Nuñez, Delia Ravelo, Laura Garcia and dozens of other first generation college students attending San Diego State College, now known as San Diego State University, in the early 1970s. Their work is documented in the memoir Teatro Chicana.

“We protested the action and behavior of the males in MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) because we didn’t agree with their disrespect, abuse and a lot of that was coming from the older Chicanos like people that were already professors, counselors and in administration,” Nuñez said.

One of their first performances was a seminar that the women put together for their mothers who visited them on campus called Chicana Goes to College.

“We just wanted to present how a young woman wanted to get out of a traditional home, very religious kind of atmosphere,” Nuñez said. “But towards the end, you know, the Chicana struggles through getting out of the house, struggles in college, and then struggles within the movimiento Chicano. She makes up her mind that she's gonna get educated regardless of being put down.”

Teatro Chicana performed at a UFW convention, in fields, anti-war demonstrations, high schools and anywhere they could. Their plays like Bronca challenged men to see women as more than notetakers, cooks and childcare.

Of course, it’s hard to talk about the farmworker movement without mentioning the late César Chávez, who was recently accused of sexually assaulting girls and women. Nunez and Garcia said the news was devastating but not that surprising.

“ If you look at the women in the teatro, out of the 17 women that wrote their memoir about 80% had been sexually molested, or abused within their families or a neighbor,” said Garcia. “ We need to talk about it in order to stop it.”

Green-card holders no longer qualify for loans from the Small Business Administration, eliminating a longtime source of financing for immigrants that advocates say will discourage job creation and harm the economy.

The SBA limited access to its loans to U.S. citizens and nationals only starting in March, and expanded that policy to SBA-backed loans beginning in April. On top of that, any business that’s even partly owned by a permanent legal resident with a green card is no longer eligible for the loans.

California — which has the most small businesses and the largest immigrant population in the nation — could be most affected. SBA loans have been important to immigrant entrepreneurs because they typically are low-interest and available to those without an established credit history. The agency has also backed loans by private funders, providing a government guarantee for people banks may deem riskier. Now, all those loans are off the table for owners and would-be owners of restaurants, bake shops, law practices, medical clinics, taxi medallions, nail salons and more who hold green cards.

Small business owners are responsible for 99% of net new jobs in the state, according to the California Office of the Small Business Advocate. Immigrant entrepreneurs make up 40% of the state’s business community and generated $28.4 billion in income in 2023, according to GO-Biz, the governor’s office of business and economic development.

Small Business Majority, a national business advocacy group, wrote to the SBA in mid-March, urging the federal agency to reconsider the changes. The letter, signed by dozens of state and national groups and chambers of commerce, called the new policies "a misguided approach that ignores critical economic data underscoring the job creating power of the immigrant community."

The SBA has a limited lending capacity, said Maggie Clemmons, a spokesperson for the agency. “The agency’s rule change will help ensure more American citizens have access to funding previously granted to noncitizens,” she said in an email.

The SBA approved 3,358 loans for small businesses owned partly by a lawful permanent resident in fiscal year 2025, largely during the Biden administration, Clemmons said. That represented 4% of the 85,000 loans approved by the agency.

In California, the changes could affect about 220,000 small business owners who hold green cards, said Carolina Martinez, chief executive of CAMEO Network, a national association of organizations that support small businesses.

“The most important thing for us is to really understand that this SBA decision… is really bad for the American economy,” Martinez said.

Pursuing the American Dream

Cristina Foanene, a Romanian immigrant who arrived in the United States 20 years ago, was a green-card holder when she obtained an SBA loan in 2018 that allowed her and her husband to buy a building and expand their glass company, MCS Glass, in Fresno. They now have 30 employees.

“The loan gave us an opportunity to create more jobs, to have an even greater impact in our community,” Foanene said. Their goal is to manufacture more products and create more positions, she added.

She said she doesn’t know where the business would be today without the SBA loans they received over the years. They just signed their third loan last month, Foanene said, their first as American citizens.

She called herself loyal to this country and said she’s sad that others like her may not have the same opportunities to pursue the American Dream by securing SBA loans while “respecting the laws.”

“It literally breaks my heart,” Foanene said. “There are so many good people with good intentions. I feel it’s unfair.”

Other entrepreneurs or independent contractors also lose a possible safety net that SBA loans once provided.

“During the pandemic, these loans were crucial to people’s survival,” said Dung Nguyen, program and organizing director for California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, an organization that advocates for Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom work in the nail-salon industry. The group signed the Small Business Majority’s letter to the SBA.

Nguyen said the nail-salon workers and owners who took out those loans during the pandemic are still paying them back.

‘A new kind of status’

Kenia Zamarripa, spokesperson for the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, which also signed the letter to the SBA, said this latest policy change is another example of how immigrants are more vulnerable as federal funds for other programs have been taken away. Her group and others are pushing for immigration reform that includes a standardized path to citizenship, she said.

“This is a community that’s doing things the right way, looking for a legal path,” she said. “It’s like you’re punishing them for doing the right thing.”

The SBA changes push green-card holders to “informality,” Zamarripa said. “What’s next? What other resources will be taken away? How else will immigrants continue to be targeted?”

Others echo that concern.

“This dialog is really challenging our concept of what undocumented means,” said Gabriela Alemán, a spokesperson for Mission Asset Fund, a San Francisco organization that supports and lends to small business owners. “These are community members that are now being pushed into a new kind of status.”

Mission Asset Fund’s lending circles — modeled after the Mexican community-based lending practice called tandas — can provide up to $2,500 in loans to small business owners. The group just got its California lenders’ license and will eventually be able to provide larger loans, Alemán said.

But it will be tough for groups like it to fill the gap left by the SBA’s new policies for permanent legal residents who may want to start or grow their businesses.

“There are not any other options at this scale (that the SBA provides),” said Brian Kennedy Jr., entrepreneur ecosystem director at AmPac Business Capital, a Los Angeles-area community development financial institution and SBA partner. “We’re talking about $35,000 up to $30 million.”

What’s next

Many small business owners already use — and may increasingly rely on — community development financial institutions and other lenders whose mission is to help people with limited options, credit histories and savings.

They could also turn to the state for help. State-funded options include a small business loan guarantee program through its IBank, and programs through the treasurer’s office that reduces risks to lenders by pledging state funds as collateral, or contributing to loan-loss reserves.

Microenterprise Collaborative of Inland Southern California works with lenders, technical assistance providers and community partners to help small business owners in Inland Southern California.

Pamela Deans, the group’s executive director, said the SBA’s policy change will alter how the organization refers entrepreneurs to sources of capital. Rather than pointing them to “a relatively straightforward” SBA process, she said the group will have to inform them of a more fragmented set of options and warn them about predatory lending.

“Many of these would‑be owners will have a much harder time piecing together enough safe, affordable capital to lease a space, buy equipment or cover early working capital — so the taquería, the child care business, the trucking startup may never open in the first place,” Deans said.

Bianca Blomquist, California director for Small Business Majority, also is concerned about small business owners turning to unscrupulous lenders. She said her group found out recently that an owner of a child care business in downtown L.A. took out a $10,000 loan at what she thought was 13% interest. It was actually closer to 250%.

Other advocates are hoping philanthropy and impact investors will step up and make more capital available to small lenders.

“Women, entrepreneurs, immigrants and communities of color always have had to think outside the typical paths,” said Leticia Landa, executive director of La Cocina, a small business incubator in San Francisco. “I do hope, especially in California, that we’re going to come up with something.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.