The Brief

In mid-December 2020, Sadie Martinez was sitting in her bedroom when her teenage daughter walked in and showed her a photo on her phone.

It was a grainy screenshot taken from surveillance video at the Michaels craft store in Petaluma, California. It showed a man and a woman standing at a cash register. The woman’s hair is up in a bun, and the man is wearing a hoodie with a design on the back that’s kind of hard to make out.

According to the Petaluma Police Department, which had sent the photo out, the couple in the photo were “persons of interest.” A week earlier, a young mother had filed a police report, saying that this couple had tried to kidnap her children from the Michaels parking lot. Now, the police were trying to track them down.

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Sadie and Eddie Martinez, a Latino couple, were falsely accused of attempted kidnapping by a white mom-fluencer in Petaluma. LAist Correspondent Emily Guerin tells us about Sadie’s quest to hold her accuser accountable, amid the “Karen phenomenon” when multiple white women were caught in viral videos falsely accusing people of color of crimes.

People vs. Karen: Part 1

Sadie and Eddie Martinez, a Latino couple, were falsely accused of attempted kidnapping by a white mom-fluencer in Petaluma. LAist Correspondent Emily Guerin tells us about Sadie’s quest to hold her accuser accountable, amid the “Karen phenomenon” when multiple white women were caught in viral videos falsely accusing people of color of crimes.

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Sadie’s daughter’s friends had seen the photo, and were telling her that the couple looked like her parents. So she showed it to her mom.

Sadie told me multiple times that she and her husband, Eddie Martinez, are just “everyday people.” They met young while growing up in San Francisco’s Mission District, and moved north to Petaluma to give their kids a better life. Petaluma, a small town surrounded by farmland, is almost 70% white, and the Martinezes feel like they stand out there. Still before all this, they felt lucky. Eddie had a career driving for UPS and Sadie was a full-time mom of five who did bookkeeping and made balloon displays for parties and graduations.

As Sadie looked at the photo, she recalled suddenly that she and Eddie had been shopping at Michaels on the day the photo was taken, Dec. 7, 2020. But they had certainly not tried to kidnap anyone’s children. The couple in the photo couldn’t be them.

A photo of Sadie and Eddie Martinez at the cash register at Michaels in Petaluma, California on Dec. 7, 2020 taken from surveillance video. This photo was sent out by the Petaluma Police Department on Dec. 14, 2020, as part of an effort to identify the couple.

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Courtesy Petaluma Police Department

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But she was curious. So she logged onto Facebook, where it felt like every mother she knew in Petaluma was sharing that surveillance photo — and an Instagram video made by the woman who had filed the police report.

In the video, which is more than 20 minutes long and filmed selfie-style, a 28-year-old white woman named Katie Sorensen described how a man and a woman had followed her and her two young children around the store six days earlier as she shopped for spray paint.

“I definitely felt the heebie-jeebies,” Katie says in the video. “I didn't feel good, but I thought I was judging a book by its cover.”

Katie, who has shoulder length blond hair, blue eyes, and is wearing a gray beanie, a black leather jacket, and tiny gold pendant, describes the couple as “not kind,” and then pauses before qualifying, “that sounds bad. But they weren't, um, they weren't clean-cut individuals.”

Katie had posted the video to her Instagram account, @motherhoodessentials. At the time, she had around 3,000 followers, and ran a small online business selling supplements, cosmetics and dispensing advice on “mindful mothering.”

Her video spread quickly, and not just among moms in Petaluma. According to the local newspaper, The Press Democrat, her video got more than 4 million views. Pretty soon, worried parents began calling the Petaluma Police Department, concerned that kidnappers were on the loose.

Kinyatta Reynolds was one of the Petaluma moms who saw Katie's video, and the surveillance photo sent out by the police. She and Sadie Martinez are good friends.

“And I'm looking at this picture, and I'm like, I know those people,” Reynolds said. She zoomed in on the man’s sweatshirt, and realized the blurry design read “Black Lives Matter.” It was a hoodie she had designed herself.

When Reynolds texted Sadie about it, Sadie confirmed: Eddie had been wearing that hoodie when they went to Michaels. It really was them in the photo.

A screenshot of Facebook messages between Sadie Martinez and Kinyatta Reynolds in December 2020, in which Kinyatta identifies Sadie and Eddie as the people in a surveillance photo sent out by the Petaluma Police Department.

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Courtesy Kinyatta Reynolds

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This is when things finally got real for Eddie, and he sat down to watch Katie's video for the first time.

“Every 30 seconds or so, I'm, I'm wanting to yell and, and scream and be like, you know, what the eff are you talking about, lady?” he recalled. “I couldn't believe what was coming outta someone's mouth.”

The entire thing was starting to feel dystopian. How could a woman they had no memory of encountering be accusing them of trying to kidnap her children?

Sadie felt, immediately, that this woman, Katie Sorensen, was a “Karen” — a white woman who called the police on Black people and other people of color because she felt uncomfortable. She decided, in those first few days, that she would not go quietly. She would fight to hold Sorensen, and all the other women like her, accountable.

It was a quest that would take her onto TikTok and national TV, into the halls of local government, and finally, in front of a jury in a California courtroom. Can the same criminal justice system that so-called Karens take advantage of be used to hold them accountable?

“If she would've picked a different couple that were immigrants and didn't have the ability to fight back and speak up, she might've gotten away with this, but unfortunately she picked us,” Sadie said. “We were the wrong people — because I'm not letting it go.”

A screenshot of the Facebook message Sadie Martinez received from Petaluma police officer Brendan McGovern in December 2020.

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Courtesy Kinyatta Reynolds

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The accusation that started it all

Not long after Sadie first saw the surveillance photo, she got a Facebook message from a Petaluma police officer named Brendan McGovern inviting the Martinezes to talk. Someone had identified them as the couple in the photo.

By the time this conversation took place, the Petaluma Police Department had already spoken to Katie Sorensen three times about her attempted kidnapping accusation. (The police declined multiple requests for interviews from LAist, but released official transcripts and audio of Sorensen’s conversations with them, as well as other documents.)

On the morning of Dec. 7, 2020, not long after leaving the Michaels in Petaluma, Katie called the police from her car, and told the dispatcher that a couple tried to kidnap her children.

“We pulled into Michaels, were getting out of the car, and a couple was parked in front of us,” she explained. “They followed us into the store.”

She explains that the couple stood behind them in the checkout line, and she overheard them, “making comments about my children's hair color and eyes.” She didn’t think the couple actually bought anything, but instead put their items down and followed her out of the store after she finished checking out.

Katie walked to her car and was buckling her 1-year old daughter into her car seat while her 4-year old son sat in the stroller. She saw the couple approach.

“They started walking in circles around my son's stroller, which was right next to me,” she told the dispatcher. “There's no reason why they should have been next to me. And so I was too scared to say something to them. So I called to someone that was standing behind them and said, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, help me.’ And she came over and they ran away.”

Katie described the man as “maybe Hispanic.” She said he had a black hoodie that said Black Lives Matter, and a neck gaiter pulled up over his face. Katie said the woman had unnatural looking red hair that looked like it was dyed from a box, and was white. (Sadie is mixed race and has lighter skin.)

She said there may have been a third person involved: the driver of a white van that was in the parking lot. She described him as being a white male with sandy blond hair and glasses.

The dispatcher told Katie to come down to the police station to speak with an officer. This time, she added a new detail about the couple’s appearance.

“They're just kind of rough looking,” she said.

Officer McGovern seemed stumped by the entire interaction. He told Katie it sounded like suspicious behavior, but didn’t meet the criteria of attempted kidnapping. Katie told him she didn’t want to press charges, she just wanted to “make people aware so it doesn’t happen to someone else.”

The police searched Michaels and the parking lot. They couldn’t find anyone involved or enough evidence to say that a crime had occurred, so they dropped the matter.

This could’ve been the end of the story. But almost a week later, on the afternoon of Dec. 13, 2020, Katie uploaded her 20-minute video to Instagram.

Petaluma's history with child abduction

Part of why the story went viral, at least locally, is that Petaluma is the home to one of the most notorious abductions of a child. In 1993, a 12-year-old girl named Polly Klaas was kidnapped by a man she didn’t know from her home during a sleepover party. Her story led national newscasts for months. The case was featured on America’s Most Wanted, made the cover of People magazine, and Winona Ryder pledged a reward of $200,000 to help find her kidnapper.

Her body was found two months later in a field near the 101 freeway, about 50 miles north of Petaluma.

Polly’s murder happened during an era of panic about rising crime rates in America — think D.A.R.E., McGruff the Crime Dog, and kids getting fingerprinted at school. The man who murdered her had a long criminal record. He was out on parole when he kidnapped her, and outrage over that led to California passing its Three Strikes law.

Even Sadie Martinez acknowledged that this is part of why local parents took Katie Sorensen’s accusation so seriously:

“You don't cry kidnapping in Petaluma without it circulating quick,” she told me.

A new detail reignites the case

One of the people who saw Katie's video was Officer McGovern, who had interviewed Katie the week earlier. He noticed a new detail that Katie hadn’t mentioned when they first spoke: she now said the man had reached for her stroller.

This might sound small, but it was a key element that would constitute attempted kidnapping.

McGovern and a detective named Corie Joerger drove to Katie's house to question her about the inconsistencies in her story. They sat on a picnic table on her back porch as Katie rocked and bounced her son, who is autistic. I reviewed the body cam video of this interview.

Throughout that conversation, which I listened to and watched, it seemed like Katie waffled between being doubtful and doubling down on her previous statements.

First, Joerger told Katie that surveillance video from Michaels contradicted her story. The couple was actually inside the store before her. They didn’t follow her in.

Katie struggled to explain the discrepancies. “When you're in a situation like that and you're on high alert, you think you're hearing things, you think you know what's happening,” she said. “So I'm not like trying to stick to my story or whatever.”

But when Joerger placed the grainy surveillance photo of Sadie and Eddie at the cash register on the table, Sorensen looked at it and said, “I’m a hundred percent sure that’s them.”

She also insisted that this couple had tried to grab her stroller.

“That part, without a shadow of a doubt, that is what was happening,” she said. “I will testify that is what happened.”

But as the conversation continued, Katie seemed less certain about aspects of her story. She acknowledged that she may have misinterpreted the couple following her in. And the white van that she initially told the dispatcher about, maybe it had nothing to do with the couple after all.

“I do think it's important for moms, parents, to be aware, but it makes me a little uneasy that you guys are getting blown up about this,” she told the officers. “I guess I'm feeling doubt that I misremembered the story, and I don't want to misrepresent what happened and make it a bigger…I don't know.”

Towards the end of the conversation, Joerger asked Sorensen if she was willing to go forward with a prosecution, and she nodded.

Later that day, December 14, the police sent out their news release. Sadie’s daughter walked into her mom’s bedroom to show her a photo on her phone. And not long after that, Sadie got a Facebook message from the Petaluma police.

Sadie and Eddie Martinez talk to the police

Soon, Sadie, Eddie and their lawyer found themselves in a Zoom room with Petulama police Lieutenant Ed Crosby.

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City of Petaluma

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They said they had gone to Michaels on December 7 because they needed to buy a baby Jesus for their nativity scene. Eddie had the day off from his job at UPS for his birthday, so they went to the store together. He wandered around while Sadie picked out the figurine. They stood in line, paid, and walked out to the car. Eddie wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant across the parking lot, so they started walking in that direction. Sadie glanced at her phone and realized it was only 10:30 — the Chinese place was closed. So they turned around, walked back to the car, and left.

They told Crosby they did not remember seeing Katie Sorensen, and they definitely did not try to grab her stroller.

After interviewing the Martinezes, Crosby called Katie. He wanted to know why she hadn’t immediately reported that the couple tried to grab her stroller.

Katie had no real explanation.

“Honestly, I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know how the mind works,” she said.

Katie told Crosby she didn't want to press charges against the Martinezes. But when Crosby gave Katie an opportunity to amend or retract her account of what happened at Michaels, she declined.

She said what happened "felt real, and that is why I shared it."

“I can appreciate your feelings,” Crosby said. “But we’re trying to get to matters of fact.”

Later that day, the police announced they were closing their investigation into the attempted kidnapping, and opening a new one — into whether Katie Sorensen had falsely reported a crime.

#ProsecuteKatie

That Friday, on Dec. 17, 2020, Sadie Martinez held a press conference in the Michaels parking lot. She wanted to formally clear their names.

A crowd of about 40 people had gathered on the asphalt, blocking several parking spots. There were moms in trucker hats, dads in vests, and little kids in bike helmets. Almost everyone was wearing a mask.

Sadie Martinez spoke out in a press conference held outside the Michaels store to confirm her and her husband, Eddie's innocence in a suspicious activity case brought on by Instagram influencer, Katie Sorensen. Kinyatta Reynolds (right), a longtime friend of the Martinezes, stood by in support.

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Crissy Pascual

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Argus-Courier

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Sadie stood at a microphone. She was wearing the same Black Lives Matter hoodie that Eddie had worn to Michaels that day, and her long wavy hair fell over her shoulders. It was clear and cool: winter in Northern California.

“[To] the Katies of the world, it stops here,” she said, and people clapped. “I think Sorensen thought that she could just pick on somebody, or make up a story about people because she didn't like what they look like. Am I shocked? No, but will we stand for it? Hell no. So today I stand in front of everybody in a fight to prosecute Katie. That’s why I’m here.”

She stood there for a minute, chin up, unsmiling as people clapped and cheered and reporters began to holler out questions.

After this press conference, Sadie focused her energy on making sure Katie would face criminal charges.

Sadie Martinez wrote "#ProsecuteKatie" in the sand on the beach in Santa Barbara.

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Courtesy Sadie Martinez

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She turned her rallying cry into her own hashtag, #ProsecuteKatie, and began writing it everywhere: in chalk on the sidewalk, in the sand on the beach, on receipts as she signed to pay at restaurants. She had sweatshirts printed. She did a banner drop over a road in Petaluma. She talked to reporters with Elle and Good Morning America and BuzzFeed News.

Is Katie a Karen?

But privately, Sadie was feeling uneasy. She was more conscious of how she dressed now, and didn’t leave home without her makeup and hair done. She couldn’t help but notice whenever she was the only Latina in a public space.

“We're forever labeled child abductors and on social media, that never ends,” she said. “It’s a lot.”

She was part of a club she never wanted to be in: people of color falsely accused of crimes by white women. And on the Internet, increasingly other people saw her this way too.

In TikToks and Instagram stories and YouTube reaction videos, people were grouping what had happened to Sadie with all the other “Karen” incidents that were going viral in 2020: the white woman who called the police on a Black birder in New York's Central Park, the white woman who called the police on a Filipino man who was painting Black Lives Matter on his own property in San Francisco, the white woman who called the police on Black people barbecuing in Oakland.

People online were also making a big deal of the fact that Katie had been a mom-influencer. The theory was that Katie was trying to boost her social media following by making an emotional video positioning herself as a victim. And indeed, Katie's following increased from 3,000 to more than 80,000 within a day of posting her video, according to BuzzFeed News.

Eddie Martinez stands for a portrait at Upper Noe Recreation Center in San Francisco on Oct. 8, 2023.

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Pablo Unzueta for LAist

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This was Sadie’s theory, too. She told me that Katie probably cast a Latino couple as the villains in her story because she thought she’d get away with it. “I do think she probably thought we were some immigrants and, you know, just stereotyping us Latin people,” she said.

Child kidnapping conspiracies

But not everyone sees Katie as a Karen, or as an influencer gone wrong. I talked to a number of people who watched the video Katie made, and saw something completely different.

Jessica met Katie Sorensen through a local mother’s group in Sonoma, where Katie used to live and where Jessica still lives. Jessica didn’t want to use her last name, for fear of being harassed or retaliated against for speaking out in support of Katie.

Jessica found Katie to be a kind and caring person who organized a donation drive for people displaced by wildfires. She knew Katie as a stay-at-home mom with three kids who belonged to the Church of Latter Day Saints in Sonoma. Katie was a pretty private person, at least in real life, and Jessica doesn’t buy the “Katie did it for the clicks” theory.

Instead, she thinks Katie must have legitimately felt scared while shopping at Michaels, and made her Instagram video because she really wanted to help other people learn from her experience.

“We were in a lot of the same social media parenting groups, and at the time I was seeing a lot of posts about attempted kidnapping and sex trafficking.” she said. “I think she bought too much into the fear-mongering and the stranger danger.”

Late 2020 was a very weird time to be on the internet. Trump had lost the election, but hadn’t conceded. It was the deadliest period of the COVID pandemic to date, and we were all social distancing. Vaccines were about to roll out but no one had them yet. Everyone was online all the time, and conspiracy theories were rampant.

One of these conspiracies was called #SaveTheChildren. Save The Children, sans hashtag, is the name of a 100-year-old nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of children around the world. But in the summer of 2020, the hashtag #SaveTheChildren was coopted by people who follow the conspiracy theorist known as QAnon. It has nothing to do with the organization.

QAnon is an online movement that emerged during the Trump presidency, and is based on centuries of antisemitic conspiracies. Its followers appear to sincerely believe that a secretive group of pedophilic, Satan-worshiping elites control our government and media. And exposing alleged child sex trafficking is a big part of QAnon.

There are real white supremacist overtones to QAnon, and to #SaveTheChildren in particular.

A typical #SaveTheChildren post features a dark-skinned hand on the shoulder or over the mouth of a white child.

“It sets up a very specific kind of image,” said Cody Buntain, a University of Maryland professor who studies online disinformation. “Young white children, especially young white girls, are at risk of being assaulted or trafficked by some other racial other.”

This imagery plays on anxieties that are deeply rooted in American history: white women being victimized by Black men. This anxiety has led to some truly horrendous things: from the murder of Emmett Till to the conviction of the Central Park Five. But the reality is that white children are not disproportionately the victims of human trafficking in America. Black and Native American children are, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Yet almost none of the #SaveTheChildren posts feature children of color, Buntain said.

In the summer of 2020, QAnon followers began using #SaveTheChildren to spread their message on social media. It showed up in the form of influencers making videos about the supposed epidemic of child kidnapping, people on Twitter sharing memes, and worried moms posting in private Facebook groups.

“There was a lot of misinformation on social media at the time that had led a lot of women to start to believe that child sex trafficking was a way bigger issue than statistically we know it is,” said Stephanie McNeal, a BuzzFeed News reporter who wrote about Katie's accusation. “I think people were brainwashed honestly. I think that moms were going to Michaels or Target, and they were legitimately afraid that their children were gonna be kidnapped at any moment.”

According to court documents, the Petaluma Police Department found Katie to be “in significant engagement with QAnon conspiracy theories which tend to center around kidnappers and pedophiles.” I later saw an Instagram post she made holding a hand-drawn sign that reads, “Let’s be the generation that ends child trafficking.” The photo caption is “slavery still exists” and ends with the hashtag #savethechildren.

Criminal charges

In April 2021, there was a huge development in the #ProsecuteKatie campaign.

The Sonoma County District Attorney charged Katie with three counts of false reporting of a crime. False reporting is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail — which means up to 18 months total if convicted on all three counts.

Criminal defense lawyers in California told us that being charged for false reporting is rare. It’s even rarer for a case to actually make it to trial. But on two separate occasions, the judge in this case denied Katie's lawyer’s request to have her case dismissed in exchange for diversity sensitivity and social media ethics training, among other concessions.

The judge, Laura Passaglia, wrote in her ruling that if Katie's case didn’t go to trial, people might believe the justice system is not fair.

“The ethics of social media manipulation, the real-world consequences of public shaming, and most importantly, the societal impact of false accusations attacking people of color in our community loom large here,” she wrote.

The trial began on April 18, 2023 in the Sonoma County Superior Court in Santa Rosa, which is about 20 miles north of Petaluma. It’s a big beige cube on a street called Administration Drive, which is like an industrial park for government buildings. The courthouse was busy, and a line had formed outside to walk through the metal detector. It was sunny and warm, and the trees were flowering and sprouting new leaves.

The courtroom was small with low ceilings, fluorescent lights, and a huge seal of the state of California on the wall. I recognized Katie's husband, mother, and six other family members. Sadie’s friend Kinyatta Reynolds sat as far from Katie's family as possible. Sadie and Eddie Martinez were not there — as witnesses for the prosecution, they were not allowed to be in the courtroom except when testifying. Katie was sitting next to her lawyer at a desk, wearing all beige.

Katie hadn’t spoken in public since the week she posted her Instagram video, over two years earlier. She and her family had since moved to Montana. Her mother, Jill Turgeon-Turrill, later told me that they had been getting death threats, and no longer felt safe in Sonoma. (I should note there is a long history of white Californians moving to the northern Rockies when they feel uncomfortable and or unsafe in California.) Katie Sorenson declined my repeated requests for an interview.

Katie had been charged with three counts of false reporting, one for each of her interactions with police. This trial was to determine whether she had knowingly lied in each of those conversations: two on December 7, the day of her trip to Michaels, and one on December 14, the day after publishing her Instagram video. The trial was notably not about what she said in that video, which is considered free speech and therefore not illegal.

The trial begins

The trial began with the prosecutor, Robert Waner’s, opening statement. He faced the jury and told them that nothing that Katie said happened actually happened. There was no attempted kidnapping. Katie, he said, was an aspiring influencer who fabricated a sensational story to go viral, so she could gain followers and sell them things. In Katie's report to the police, she focused heavily on Eddie Martinez’s appearance, and Waner told jurors that her fake story had a devastating effect on Eddie and his wife, Sadie. Find Katie guilty, he said.

Defendant Katie Sorensen, left, listens to her defense attorney Charles Dresow during the first day of her trial in Sonoma County Superior Court in Santa Rosa on Tuesday, April 18, 2023.

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Christopher Chung

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The Press Democrat

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Then it was defense attorney Charles Dresow’s turn. He reminded the jury that this incident occurred in late 2020, peak COVID. Katie, he said, was extremely anxious at Michaels that day, an emotional state that caused her to misinterpret Sadie and Eddie’s behavior as threatening. He said Katie did not knowingly file a false police report: she really believed she was in danger, although she now realizes she was wrong. Find Katie not guilty, he urged.

It seemed that both the prosecution and the defense agreed that no attempted kidnapping had ever happened. Sadie and Eddie were completely innocent. Now the question was: Had Katie lied? And could the prosecutor convince the entire jury of that, beyond a reasonable doubt?

Over the course of the next four days, the prosecutor presented his evidence. He called his witnesses, Sadie and Eddie Martinez, who told the jury that the shopping trip had been completely ordinary. He played surveillance video from Michaels, which contradicted key elements of Katie’s story, like showing that the Martinezes had not followed her inside.

The most dramatic moment of the trial was when Eddie demonstrated a big, sweeping hand gesture he’d made out of disappointment in the Michaels parking lot when he discovered the Chinese restaurant was closed. It just so happened that he was standing behind Katie’s car when he made the gesture.

This gesture, Katie's attorney argued, was what she had honestly misinterpreted as Eddie reaching for her stroller. She found Eddie’s hand movement threatening, so she called the police.

It was clear to me that this case was about how a white woman had interpreted the body language of a Latino man. But now I was realizing that it could hinge on a single hand motion.

The last piece of evidence the prosecution presented was a slideshow of Katie's social media profile. The goal, it seemed, was to flesh out her alleged motive: the “Katie is an influencer who made up a wild story to gain followers” theory.

The prosecutor clicked through the slides. There were pictures of the essential oils and cosmetics and supplements Katie sold through her business, Motherhood Essentials. There were pictures of Katie blowing flower petals at the camera. There were comments she’d made on other people’s posts, saying things like, “I'm looking to focus more on consulting, influencing — eek — for clean living.”

I watched Katie watch herself on screen — this humiliating, incomplete portrait of her. She had been expressionless the whole time. But now, she took off her glasses, and started to cry.

After this, the prosecutor was done presenting evidence. The judge turned to Sorensen’s lawyer, who announced that he had just one witness: Katie Sorensen.

Katie Sorenson testifies

Katie Sorenson's testimony was by far the most riveting part of the trial. When she took the stand, she had her hair down, and her tortoiseshell glasses on. She looked over at the jury, smiled, and introduced herself as a mother.

Over the course of the next half hour or so, she reiterated three main points:

One: she truly believed her kids had been in danger that day at Michaels. Two: her feelings of fear had nothing to do with Sadie and Eddie’s race or ethnicity. And three: she’s since realized she was wrong about what happened.

She told the jury that she no longer believed anyone tried to kidnap her children. Instead, what occurred that day was “an odd series of coincidental events that I misinterpreted.”

In the cross examination, the prosecutor asked Katie directly why she described Eddie as “rough-looking.” I had been waiting for this moment — he’d barely mentioned race at all.

Katie replied, “the manner in which he carried himself throughout the store.”

In other words, it was Eddie’s demeanor, not his appearance, that had been “rough-looking.”

Katie Sorensen and her attorney Charles Dresow, listen as her sentence is read by judge Laura Passaglia during her sentencing at Sonoma County Superior Court in Santa Rosa, Thursday, June 29, 2023.

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Kent Porter

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The Press Democrat

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On the final day of the trial, prosecutor Robert Waner stood directly in front of the jury, and gave his closing arguments. He told the jury that Katie Sorensen was guilty. He said it was impossible that she misinterpreted the events, she had been lying. He said that Katie was an influencer who was trying to boost her online presence by fabricating a wild story. And he said she doubled down when confronted by the police on December 14, the day after she posted her video.

Katie's attorney, Charles Dresow, argued that it had been reasonable for her to believe her kids were in danger. He dwelled in particular on Eddie’s big sweeping hand gesture. He said Sorensen, in her heightened state of COVID anxiety, certainly could have misinterpreted this gesture as Eddie trying to grab her stroller.

The verdict

The jury reached their verdict the following afternoon. I saw Katie's family in the hallway, heads bowed, praying, before we all re-entered the courtroom to hear the decision.

The jury of found Katie not guilty of the first two counts — which were her two initial interactions with police on December 7, the day she left Michaels.

They found her guilty of the third count — her conversation with police on December 14, the day after her video went live.

Katie's family seemed stunned. No one did or said anything. Katie was totally expressionless. The bailiff walked over and she stood while he put black metal handcuffs on her.

The judge set Katie's bail at $100,000, which I later learned was pretty high for a non-violent misdemeanor. She was escorted down to the Sonoma County Jail, where she sat for a few hours until her family could get a bail bond.

The judge thanked the jurors for their service and dismissed everyone.

In the hallway, Katie's mom, Jill Turgeon-Turrill, and her husband, Eric, walked straight over to me and a reporter named Colin Atagi, who works for the local newspaper, the Press Democrat.

Turgeon-Turrill had tears in her eyes, and she seemed furious the jury hadn’t interpreted the evidence the way she had. She told us about the financial and emotional toll the case had taken. She’d spent her late husband’s life insurance on legal fees, and said Katie had received death threats.

Katie, she said, had no animosity towards the Martinezes. In fact, Turgeon-Turrill added, “they have been just as much a victim in this as she has.”

The sentence

Two months later, Katie was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Because of California’s sentencing rules on non-violent misdemeanors, she served half that. Her jail time was followed by 60 days of work release, after which she’d be on probation for the next nine months. During that time she couldn’t use social media, and she had to take racial bias and social media ethics training.

Sadie Martinez stands for a portrait at Upper Noe Recreation Center in San Francisco on Oct. 8, 2023.

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Pablo Unzueta for LAist

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Sadie Martinez was pleased. “Obviously I would've preferred her to have been found guilty on all three counts,” she told me, “but as long as she's held accountable in some fashion, that was all I really cared about.” She felt jail time was necessary given that, in her mind, Sorensen had never apologized meaningfully or showed remorse.

But Eddie was feeling more ambivalent. He was relieved that justice had been served, and felt like the judge had chosen to make an example of Katie by giving her jail time. But he felt bad for her children.

“They didn't ask for this,” he said. “To go 30 days wondering, ‘Where's mom?’ I don't wish that upon anybody.”

I wondered if Sadie and Eddie were disappointed that the prosecutor didn’t bring up race more in the trial. I knew that Sadie really wanted Katie to be held accountable for what she felt was an obvious case of racial profiling, and that hadn’t really happened.

The Sonoma County district attorney, Carla Rodriguez, had told me they chose not to delve into race during the trial because Katie's language wasn’t “racially-based.” She used words like “not clean cut,” and “rough-looking.” Besides, Rodriguez told me, they didn’t need to get into race to prove she had lied to the police.

Sadie Martinez and Eddie Martinez stand for a portrait at Upper Noe Recreation Center in San Francisco on Oct. 8, 2023. According to the couple, Sadie and Eddie first met at the Upper Noe Recreation Center, where they both grew up around the neighborhood.

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Pablo Unzueta for LAist

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Sadie had initially been bothered by this, but she now understood that it would have been very difficult for the prosecutor to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Katie was racist. Besides, “there's no need to convince anybody that anything is racial when you live it,” she said. “I know it's about race and that's enough for me.”

Now that Katie Sorenson has been sentenced, Sadie’s #ProsecuteKatie campaign has run its course. Now Sadie wants to do more.

In early 2021, after Katie's Instagram video came out, Sadie was asked to join a police reform commission in Petaluma. She proposed a law that would make it a crime to make a racially motivated 911 call. Laws like this already exist in a handful of other cities, including San Francisco. Their law is called the “Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies,” — a.k.a. the CAREN Act.

Sadie’s initial proposal didn’t go anywhere — but she's planning to try again. The next step is gathering signatures for a petition in support of a local version of the CAREN ACT — which she’s calling the Sadie Stance.

California has been preparing to fill a budget gap for gender-affirming care procedures after the federal government pulled the funds under the direction of President Donald Trump and Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

LAist crunched the numbers to see if the state has budgeted enough, and here’s what we found.

Youth on Medi-Cal bill $1 million yearly for hormones

People under 18 covered by Medi-Cal filed about $1 million in claims in 2025 for hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers, according to data California’s Department of Health Care Services. That accounted for about 4,000 claims.

Some providers that take trans youth patients on Medi-Cal, like Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’ trans youth clinic, closed last year, though many doctors still were able to write out prescriptions that lasted patients for months after that.

Some care remains covered 

Medi-Cal also covered 4,800 claims for about 1,500 Medi-Cal members under 18 in 2025 for “doctor visits, counseling, surgeries, speech therapy, and other services,” totaling $6.4 million. Gender-affirming surgeries are only recommended for minors in rare circumstances.

However, the restrictions in the federal Medicaid rule only affect puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy and surgeries, according to health policy organization KFF, so services like mental health treatment would still be reimbursable with federal funds. The rule, which would take effect Oct. 13, also lets states pay for minors’ gender-affirming hormone treatments and surgeries themselves.

The state has already set aside two pots of money to close gaps in funding for gender-affirming healthcare services: a $30 million fund for gender-affirming care and abortion services, and a $26 million trust fund specifically for trans healthcare. California Health & Human Services Agency leaders anticipate the funds will cover these Medi-Cal services over the next three years.

Medi-Cal’s budget

The overall Medi-Cal program budget during this period was almost $200 billion, according to state data. Transgender youth health services, including mental health services, make up just 0.004% of the plan’s budget.

Medi-Cal administers both the federal Medicaid program and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) under a Medicaid expansion allowed for by the Affordable Care Act.

“The federal rule applies solely to federal Medicaid and CHIP funding; California will determine any adjustments needed to align with federal requirements,” California Department of Health Care Services spokesperson Anthony Cava said in a statement. “California remains committed to safeguarding access to medically necessary care for Medi-Cal members, including gender-affirming care.”

Medi-Cal agencies like L.A. Care have stated that they are continuing to cover gender-affirming care services.

Issues may still arise

While they celebrated the establishment of the fund, trans healthcare advocates have noted that some issues may arise due to providers who are unsure how the new state rules apply.

The California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus has also said it’s bracing for future budget years to be “even more challenging as federal funding cuts and attacks on targeted investments to marginalized communities continue to threaten critical services.”

Meanwhile, California Attorney General Rob Bonta has denounced the restrictions on federal funding since they were first floated last year. A lawsuit has not yet been announced, but a spokesperson for his office told LAist, “We are closely reviewing the final rule.”

After homelessness advocates pushed a Los Angeles City Council member to change how the city treats encampments in his district, the full City Council voted Tuesday to selectively stop enforcing a law that bans unhoused people from sleeping in certain areas.

A controversial policy

One of the city’s most controversial enforcement laws on homelessness is found in section 41.18 of L.A.’s municipal code. It allows local elected leaders to establish zones where unhoused people cannot sit, lie down, sleep or keep belongings on sidewalks or other public areas.

What's new?

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez — who represents a district including Hollywood, Silver Lake and Echo Park — recently introduced a motion to remove some of the 41.18 districts established by his predecessor, Mitch O'Farrell.

On Tuesday, the council voted 10-3 to allow some zones to be erased in Soto-Martinez’s district. The zones include underpasses in Silver Lake, underpasses in Echo Park and 101 Freeway overpasses in Hollywood.

Soto-Martinez said he believed today’s measure was the first effort to have 41.18 zones removed rather than put in place.

The debate

Supporters of 41.18 have said the policy allows officials to keep encampments away from schools, parks and other areas deemed “sensitive” by the city, enabling parents to keep their children away from encampments and helping to keep important pedestrian infrastructure clear.

Critics have said the policy doesn’t reliably keep encampments away from sensitive sites because people simply return after sweeps that don't offer them housing.

In Tuesday’s meeting, Soto-Martinez said enforcement in some of these areas leads to unhoused people losing their belongings, becoming lost to outreach workers and sometimes getting arrested.

“To me, that is a policy that does not work,” Soto-Martinez said in Tuesday’s meeting. “In our district, these zones were making it harder to do the things that do work.”

Councilmember Nithya Raman, now running for mayor, has also argued the policy is ineffective, saying it merely moves encampments to other blocks without getting people into housing.

A 2023 report from L.A.’s lead homelessness agency, first covered by LAist, concluded that the policy hadn’t kept most areas clear of encampments, and was “generally ineffective” at connecting people to housing.

Dissenting votes

Some council members strongly defend using 41.18 in their districts. Three voted against rescinding the zones in Soto-Martinez’s district.

Monica Rodriguez, council member for a district that covers much of the northeast San Fernando Valley, said during Tuesday’s meeting that “41.18 was never intended to be the solution to our homeless problem. In fact quite the opposite. It’s just about protecting public spaces for families who want to be able to take their kids to the park and not have to be exposed to it.”

El Niño is officially with us, and it’s looking like it’s likely going to be a doozy.

The natural global climate pattern temporarily warms the eastern tropical Pacific, causing extreme weather patterns across the globe. A strong El Niño has historically, though not always, been associated with very wet winters here in Southern California.

“ We are now explicitly expecting the strongest El Niño event ever observed,” said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain. “ There will be a strong tilt in the odds towards wet, perhaps even very wet conditions in Southern California.”

Maybe you remember the very wet El Niños of years past — 1982 and 1997. Both were historic events that led to billions of dollars in damage and dozens of deaths.

“This is highly likely to exceed what occurred in [1982 or 1997], and by a considerable margin,” Swain said.

The good news? You still have time to prepare.

Experts emphasize that people need to develop an understanding of their personal risk, talk to neighbors who may have experienced flooding in the past and consider getting insured.

Know your risk

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, compiles flood risk maps (you can also use this L.A. County map here).

Be aware that they are not comprehensive and can be out-of-date. Also, they include only risk from coastal flooding, such as tides and waves, as well as from rivers, creeks, channels and levies, which risk spilling over after back-to-back severe storms.

But the maps don’t include flood risk from short, heavy downpours or mudflows in recent burn zones, said Brett Sanders, a professor leading UC Irvine’s Flood Lab. So even if your home is not within an official flood zone, you could be at risk.

“What used to be grasslands and open space has been covered more and more by asphalt and concrete,” Sanders said. “And so more and more water runs off and these flood risks are increasing.”

Flooding diverts traffic on a Long Beach street in 2024.

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Eric Thayer

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Associated Press

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His lab has been working to figure out how to develop more comprehensive flood maps, to better determine risks and reflect changes brought on by a warming climate.

But Sanders said one of your best bets to prepare is low-tech: speak with neighbors or officials who know your local area, and remember how past severe rain events have affected your street or neighborhood. For example, if you live at the base of a hill, or in a basement or ground-level apartment, you’re more likely to see some water flow. That historical memory can help you develop a plan for a worst-case scenario.

“Some common sense local awareness from people is really valuable,” Sanders said. “Talk to somebody that's been around for a while. Ask them, ‘Do you remember floods happening here in the past?’ Or, ‘What happened in 1997 when we had our last really wet El Nino?’”

Once you know, consider filling sand bags ahead of time, keep drainages around and on your house clear, and think about how flooding may affect your travel routes.

People who live in recent wildfire burn areas are likely through the worst of it, Swain said.

“ I think the initial highest risk period will have passed by this winter,” he said.

Still, mudflow is possible. So remember how mud flowed during the storms soon after the 2025 L.A. fires and make sure you have what you need to protect your property and evacuate safely if needed.

Consider flood insurance

Homeowners and renters should take a moment to read their current insurance policies closely. Most homeowners insurance, as well as renters insurance, does not include coverage for flooding (water damage coverage is not flood coverage). Less than 2% of Californians have flood insurance at all.

If you don’t have it, get a quote, said Amy Bach, director of United Policyholders, a nonprofit that advocates for insurance consumers. Flood insurance is usually a lot cheaper than typical insurance.

“ Don't make a decision not to carry flood insurance without getting a quote,” she said. “Find out how much it would cost before you decide.”

If you do get flood insurance, it’ll take about a month to kick in, so you want to start looking now before the official start of the wet season in October.

You can get flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program, or some private companies. United Policyholders has a variety of resources to figure out which product is right for you. Bach also pointed to a tool by the California Department of Insurance to compare various insurers based on complaints against them, as well the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, which can help you identify your risks.

“If it rains, it can flood,” Bach said. “And that is more true today than it used to be.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Hundreds of East Los Angeles households near the site of the Lineage warehouse fire will begin receiving a one-time $200 utility credit on their Southern California Edison bills after weeks of pressure from residents and L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis to extend relief beyond Boyle Heights. 

Lineage, the owner of the cold-storage warehouse, initially provided $50,000 in utility assistance to 218 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers in Boyle Heights. Residents in unincorporated East L.A., including some who live just blocks from the warehouse, were not included in that support. 

Last week, David Eisenhauer, a representative with Southern California Edison (SCE), told Boyle Heights Beat that Lineage provided $26,600 to cover $200 credits for 133 households in East L.A. These residents live within a boundary designated as Zone 2, which stretches between Indiana Street and Hicks Avenue, and Union Pacific Avenue and the 5 Freeway. SCE said customers living within the boundary will receive an automatic $200 credit applied to their accounts. 

The expansion came after Solis called on Lineage to provide East L.A. residents with the same level of support that was given to the city.

“Lineage has a responsibility to provide fair and equitable support to everyone affected by this disaster, including delivering the remaining $25,000 in utility assistance that was allocated for East Los Angeles residents,” Solis said in a statement to Boyle Heights Beat. 

“After learning that Lineage was working with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to provide utility assistance to Boyle Heights residents, I made clear that East Los Angeles residents deserved the same level of support through Southern California Edison,” Solis said. 

On Monday, a Lineage representative told the Beat that the relief had been expanded to cover hundreds more households in East L.A., extending as far as Herbert Avenue. The company has not yet determined the exact amount of support it will provide and some SCE customers’ credits are still being distributed.

The utility assistance comes as residents continue to report higher electricity bills after relying on air purifiers and air conditioners to cope with the stench of rotting food inside the warehouse and poor air quality following the June 17 warehouse fire. 

Why some residents qualify and others don’t

The boundaries of Lineage’s relief programs have been a source of confusion for residents. 

At a virtual community meeting hosted by the mayor’s office last Thursday, a resident sent in a question asking, “Why are not all residents affected by the fire and stench eligible for financial assistance?”

Officials have used a map dividing the area around the warehouse into Zones 1, 2 and 3, with the zones representing the areas closest to the fire. It is unclear who created the map and how those boundaries were established. 

A map of Zones 1, 2 and 3 used by Lineage to determine the type of support offered to households closest to the Lineage warehouse.

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Courtesy of Lineage

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Lineage has used the map to determine which households are eligible for various forms of relief, including air purifiers, air conditioners, housing support, grocery vouchers, cash assistance and utility credits. 

For weeks, residents have called for broader relief, saying the effects of the fire and lingering odors have affected not only homes close to the warehouse, but neighboring areas as well. 

In response, Jenny Delwood, deputy chief of staff to L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said that while the areas closest to the warehouse had been prioritized, “… Bass and her partners from the county and city are working to raise additional funding to provide more utility assistance and additional bill payments for a larger geographic area.”

Details on expanded support for households outside of the boundary were not immediately available.

How to know if you qualify: 

According to SCE, customers living between Indiana Street, Herbert Avenue, Union Pacific Avenue and the 5 Freeway will begin receiving an automatic credit to their account.

No further action is required from qualified customers.

LADWP customers living between Los Palos Street, Indiana Street, Union Pacific Avenue and Beswick Street received an automatic credit to their account on July 31.

What support is available for residents who live outside of the boundary?

SCE customers can apply for:

• A number of income-based programs with discounts, including the California Alternate Rates for Energy and Family Electric Rate Assistance. 
• Payment plans, including a long-term installment plan, so customers can spread their balance over time with manageable payments, and the Budget Billing Plan, which helps spread energy costs more evenly throughout the year. (For customers within the impact boundary who enter into a long-term installment plan, the down payment for a new payment plan will be waived.) 
• The Energy Assistance Fund, which provides one-time bill assistance of up to $200. SCE works with United Way and over 80 community-based organizations to provide the assistance but customers need to apply directly through the organization. To find the partner organization closest to you, click here.
• Customers in areas affected by the fire can get more information on SCE’s support programs here.

LADWP customers can request:

• Payment arrangements: No down payment, no interest, no fees; A long-term payment option that divides the total account balance evenly across a specified number of billing periods.
• Payment extension: A short-term payment option that gives customers additional time, up to one billing period, to pay their full balance.
• Level pay: A billing option that helps you plan by providing predictable monthly bills based on average usage. You can also roll in past-due balances.

To inquire about these programs, call 1-800-DIAL-DWP, visit a customer service center or use the online form on LADWP.com/ContactUs.

LADWP customers can also apply for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) through the Maravilla Foundation. But the Maravilla Foundation website says that due to reduced government funding and high demand, fewer applications are being accepted. To qualify for LIHEAP, the monthly income for a family of four must not exceed $6,407.16. A full list of requirements and application instructions can be found here.