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.

Nearly 86,000 of California’s children ages 0 to 3 — more than 5% of the state’s infants and toddlers — are estimated to have experienced homelessness in 2023-24, according to new data analysis by SchoolHouse Connection and Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan.

This is a 15% jump from about 74,000 young children in the year prior.

Only about 12,000 of those children in 2023-24 were enrolled in early learning programs. It is often in early learning programs where staff members are able to identify children experiencing homelessness and provide critical services for their development.

That just 14% of the youngest children experiencing homelessness are in these programs is potentially a troubling sign, experts say. It may indicate the state is not set up to accurately identify and reach most of these children.

“We just don’t have the full picture,” said Erin Patterson, a senior director at SchoolHouse Connection. “Data reporting infrastructure everywhere is lacking when it comes to infants and toddlers experiencing homelessness. There is no singular federal agency or program that captures everything.”

This is after years of sustained efforts by child homelessness experts that have led to heightened attention and short-term funding for students experiencing homelessness and the significant barriers K-12 schools face in identifying them. That focus has not always included the youngest Californians — infants and toddlers — in part because the state’s early learning system is far more fragmented.

This data from SchoolHouse Connection, an organization that advocates for homeless students, and Poverty Solutions, a University of Michigan initiative to prevent and alleviate poverty, was shared with EdSource ahead of the Sept. 23 release of their third annual report on the prevalence of homelessness among children 0 to 3 nationwide.

The nearly 86,000 homeless infants and toddlers were 5.19% of about 1.6 million children ages 0 to 3 in 2023-24. The number is an estimate, taken by looking at the percentage of first grade students who were identified as homeless during the 2023-24 year and applying it to the census age group percentages for children ages 0 to 3.

To get to the number of children accessing early childhood programs, the researchers looked at enrollment data from Early Head Start, home visiting programs and local educational agencies, which are required to identify younger children experiencing homelessness if they receive federal funding.

Some children might have been identified and are simply not reflected in the estimate, in part because data access is extremely limited and fragmented across multiple public agencies, say the researchers.

Student homelessness across the K-12 system has risen 4% in the most recent data available. In years prior, it rose by up to 15%, according to state data.

Child homelessness experts contend the rise in student homelessness reflects several factors, including California’s skyrocketing cost of living and the end of pandemic-era housing protections.

At the same time, they point to short-term infusions of funding that have helped schools improve data collection systems and identification practices that allowed them to begin supporting more students.

Homeless liaisons have attributed many of those gains to a 2021 historic federal allocation of $800 million for schools nationwide, of which California received $98.76 million. The one-time pandemic-era funding was dedicated entirely to identifying and supporting students experiencing homelessness.

Child homelessness experts say data shows the funding worked: after what appeared as a significant dip in student homelessness rates at the peak of the pandemic, there was a sharp increase once schools reopened. They attribute this dramatic shift to the identification efforts by liaisons, who by then had the funding to hire staff to make phone calls to families they knew were struggling, distribute gas cards to help families get their children to school, pay for emergency temporary housing for evicted families and more.

The closest California has come to matching those pandemic-era dollars is a one-time $116 million grant approved by the state Legislature this year. It will support identification efforts, though it remains unclear how the state will distribute the funding.

“The state’s really going to have to be targeted about where this money goes, and I think a set-aside amount for identifying our youngest learners makes a ton of sense because that $116 million is not going to reach everybody,” said Joseph Bishop, executive director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools.

But experts warn that without long-term funding to maintain those efforts in the TK-12 system, it will be even more difficult to build similar identification capacity in the early learning space to ensure children 0-3 can also be connected to services they need as their families find permanent housing. At the same time, they foresee that more children are likely to be in need in coming years.

“Given what we know about worsening economic conditions, we can certainly surmise that families with children, in particular, have been impacted by housing instability and homelessness,” said Patterson. “The tricky part, though, is pandemic funds are gone, and that means the capacity to identify has dwindled in many places, so we might be entering a phase where we see homelessness increasing, but identification is scaling back because of limited capacity, both in early childhood programs and among local educational agencies.”

Why counting homeless infants and toddlers is tough — and why it matters

Not only is the data from SchoolHouse Connection and Poverty Solutions likely an undercount, but there are other factors that affect the ability to identify students. The early childhood services system in the state is more fractured than K-12, say researchers. And, there may be limited knowledge of the responsibility of local education agencies to identify and support homeless students.

Knowledge of how the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act applies to early learning programs is also less widespread. The law requires local education agencies, such as school districts and certain preschools, to identify and support homeless students, including those younger than 4, which is the age for entering transitional kindergarten.

How does the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act help?

When McKinney-Vento was enacted decades ago, it established a broader definition of homelessness for students. For example, the law considers a student homeless if they are staying with relatives or in temporary housing due to economic hardship, loss of housing or a similar reason.

The law can apply to preschools under specific circumstances, including when a program is funded by a local education agency, like a school district. This flowchart provides some detail into whether an early learning program might be a McKinney-Vento preschool.

And if a homeless liaison identifies a homeless student with an infant or toddler sibling, the federal act requires them to refer the young child to early learning programs.

Even when McKinney-Vento does not directly apply, many early learning programs have adopted its broader definition of homelessness and require certain exceptions be made for homeless families. This could include allowing a child to begin attending the program while providing a grace period for families to produce enrollment documentation or giving priority enrollment to homeless families.

An apparent disconnect between early learning and the TK-12 school system

Child education experts have noted a disconnect between early learning programs and the TK-12 school system, where homeless liaisons are already stretched thin.

“There’s a major flaw in not having those systems in place, and I think it can make the work of districts potentially more effective if we had earlier identification,” said Bishop of UCLA. “We don’t know or have the continuity across systems to know where kids are coming from, even sometimes within districts, let alone before TK.”

Bishop’s team published a report last week finding that nearly 300,000 homeless students were enrolled in California’s TK-12 public school system in the 2024-25 school year. This is an additional nearly 30,000 more students than what they estimated prior to the pandemic in 2018-19.

While the report did not include children experiencing homelessness who were enrolled in early learning programs — Bishop said his team wanted to include them but faced challenges obtaining the data — it found that many of the highest counts of homeless students were in elementary school districts.

Anticipating “where the need is coming from” via better identification and data collection could help districts better support their students.

“We’re sometimes shocked when students are struggling academically” once they reach elementary school, said Bishop. “That’s the ripple effect of not having the early warning systems.”

As fights about data centers erupt nationwide, California lawmakers have approved a pair of bills to make data center developers disclose how much water they really use.

The bills are a new test of whether California will set limits on an industry that’s becoming a flashpoint over water, electricity and the environmental consequences of artificial intelligence.

Lawmakers on Monday cleared Assembly Bill 2469 by Assemblymember Diane Papan, a Democrat from San Mateo. The bill bars local governments from approving new or expanded data centers unless the developer discloses its water plans and covers the full cost of any new water pipes, treatment or storage for the facility. 

This bill will now join Papan’s Assembly Bill 2619 on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.

California senators last week, in a decisive 30 to 9 vote, approved the measure requiring data center operators to report their estimated or actual water sources and use — under penalty of perjury — when seeking and renewing a business license or permit.

It’s almost identical to a bill Papan authored last year, which Newsom vetoed amid pressure from the tech industry.

Newsom said at the time he was “reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements … without understanding the full impact on businesses and the consumers of their technology.”

Papan said she’s often asked whether she thinks her do-over will survive Newsom’s desk, this time.

“To which I say, the opportunity for leadership has not gone away. If anything, it has been amplified,” Papan told CalMatters.

Since Newsom’s veto last year, public sentiment has shifted, with bipartisan backlash building against facilities that have become the ganglia of artificial intelligence.

A Public Policy Institute of California survey found that a majority of residents oppose construction of data centers in their areas, and are concerned about the environmental impacts.

“We currently are seeing a phase of heightened concern because of the rapid evolution of the industry — and the lack of transparency,” said Iris Stewart-Frey, an environmental science professor at Santa Clara University who led a study this year highlighting how rarely data center developers disclose their water use.

“I think that's where these bills can really make some progress in getting the sides back to the table and conversation,” Stewart-Frey said, “and also recreate some of this public trust.”

Lack of oversight, local bans

Opacity around data centers’ environmental impact is fueling fights around the state, from the desert and parched Imperial County to cities and farm towns.

With little oversight and even less state direction, local governments are saying no to data centers, citing concerns about environmental issues, electricity rates, and often, water.

Monterey Park, in the San Gabriel Valley, led the way when voters approved a permanent ban in June. The Coachella City Council approved its own ban last week to public applause. Others including the Tulare County Board of Supervisors are pausing as they weigh more permanent moratoriums.

Nationally, New York State has enacted a yearlong moratorium, and 70% of Americans told a Gallup poll that they oppose the facilities.

A fight over a data center in the city of Gilroy, in Santa Clara County, recently made national news, which Stewart-Frey attributed to growing public awareness and distrust of the secretive industry.

“It's also emblematic of the fact that the data center industry in California has not been releasing actual water use data, right?” said Stewart-Frey. “This lack of transparency is also biting them in the back here.”

Papan said that’s the point of her bills.

“I don't think we should be eliminating anything without sufficient knowledge about what their needs are, and then how can we meet those needs,” Papan said. “Help us help you,” she said, to data center developers, “because if you go into an area that doesn't have sufficient water supply for you, it's not going to work.”

The usual suspects, and new wildcards

The usual coalitions have lined up. Environmental and community groups back the bills, seeking more transparency over how much water these facilities really use. On the other side are the heavy-hitting and big-spending tech industry and business groups.

Khara Boender, a Western government affairs director for the Data Center Coalition, said the trade association is concerned that these bills single out data centers from other non-agricultural water users.

Reporting tied to receiving a business license or permit “should apply to other similar commercial and industrial users, as that would provide context and a holistic view of water demands,” Boender told CalMatters.

A few wildcards have also entered the fight. As of mid-August, the League of California Cities, the California State Association of Counties, and the Rural County Representatives of California opposed Papan’s bill requiring developers to disclose water plans and pay for upgrades.

In a July letter the groups said the measure — which would bar local governments from approving data centers that fail to disclose required information about their water plans — “undermines local governments’ ability to protect and represent their communities through established permitting mechanisms and community engagement processes.”

Water agencies have mostly stayed quiet, raising only technical issues, with one exception: Santa Clara Valley Water District, a water wholesaler in a data center hotspot, supported both bills.

“Despite local efforts to mitigate the impact of data center water demand, more information on water use could help local water agencies, such as Valley Water, plan for actual needs,” Joshua Golka, head of state government relations for Valley Water, said in a letter to Papan Friday.

Necessary but not sufficient 

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment, called Papan’s bills “necessary, but not sufficient.”

He expects that even with more data, small communities with limited resources and staff will still struggle to assess the benefits and risks. The version of AB 2619 that senators approved last week cut an earlier provision requiring California agencies to develop guidance for local governments.

Papan said that guidance would have been nice to have, but that there were state costs associated with developing it. An Assembly analysis estimated that developing water-use and emerging technology guidelines would cost $2 million the first year, and $1 million annually after that.

“The main goal has been transparency. Let me give you the data, and let's go from there,” Papan told CalMatters. “I just didn't want anything to divert from that main goal.”

Kiparsky called for the state to establish a strike team to help small communities analyze the data that would be produced under the legislation. He also thinks the state should post this information in one place so officials and academics can assess the impacts of data centers and the policies regulating them.

“To be really clear, data centers are not bad or good … we use them every day for just about everything we do involving technology,” Kiparsky said.

The real question, he said, is whether a given community — and its specific mix of land, water, and energy resources — is the right spot for one.

“You can’t answer those questions just with what’s required from this bill — you need to have the understanding that comes from experts looking at it,” Kiparsky said. “The state, in my opinion, can and should provide that.”

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

California’s mandate requiring later start times for middle and high schools is already yielding results, with students sleeping more, reporting better mental health and scoring higher math and English scores, according to a new study.

The new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines the effects of Senate Bill 328, California’s statewide mandate for later school start times. The law, which went into effect in 2022, requires most middle schools to start no earlier than 8 a.m. and high schools no earlier than 8:30 a.m.

The study found that the new law increased the share of students sleeping at least eight hours per night by 13%, meeting the minimum recommended for adolescents by health experts. The largest jump was among boys.

The study shows that “rest and sleep are incredibly important in the function of schools,” said Osea Giuntella, an author of the report. Although the short-term increase in sleep is moderate, it has led to significant improvements in mental health and academic outcomes, he said.

Giuntella, a University of Pittsburgh researcher who studies sleep and economics, said the study’s first-year results are consistent with previous research linking better sleep to improved student well-being and academic performance. The study used changes in teachers’ commute arrival times from the American Community Survey as a proxy for later school start times, comparing sleep and mental health data before and after SB 328 took effect in the 2022-2023 school year and tracking academic gains from 2022 through 2025.

Gains in sleep, mental health, English and math

Students reported experiencing better mental health since schools shifted to later start times, with boys reporting the largest reductions in sadness, hopelessness and suicidal ideation, and Hispanic students reporting the biggest drop in difficulties concentrating.

Terra Ziporyn, executive director at nonprofit Start Schools Later and longtime advocate of later school start times, said SB 328 was a key part of California’s response to what schools have described as a student mental health crisis.

“The first step in addressing student mental health problems is to not create them in the first place,” Ziporyn said. “You can get a lot of counselors, but systematically depriving an entire adolescent population of adequate sleep is a surefire way to hurt their mental health.”

The study also found significant improvements in academic achievement, with eighth grade students making measurable gains in math and English, particularly among Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students.

Giuntella, the study’s author, said the improvement in scores was likely “largely driven by the change in sleep” based on comparable studies where increased sleep led to higher GPAs. That’s also why Hispanic students, who are already less likely to get adequate sleep than white students due to lower family income and family and work responsibilities, improved their math and English scores the most, Giuntella said.

Parents struggle with new schedules

The state mandate is the only one in the nation.

“California set a huge precedent for the whole nation by saying, ‘We cannot leave what is essentially a public health decision in the hands of local districts,’ ” Ziproyn said. “It’s not just a negotiable school budget item that you trade off against anything else.”

But some parents have said later start times complicate work commutes, push back sports and extracurricular activities and lead to some students simply pushing back the time they go to bed.

The study found that sports and extracurricular activities did start later after the change to later start times, but the changes were “marginal and not statistically significant,” Giuntella said.

“And it’s true that, yes, students may even go to bed a little later than they were, but they are definitely sleeping in more in the morning,” she said.

Guintella described later start times as just “one institutional factor” that may help address a complex sleep-deprivation problem, pointing to issues like the rise in nighttime screen use.

‘Too hard and too expensive’ for some districts

Some school districts found the transition to later school start times “too hard and too expensive,” Ziporyn said. Ziporyn said district administrators could have received more guidance from the state Department of Education to explain the benefits of later start times, and involve families in finding solutions to logistical problems.

“(Schools) have to fully understand why this is being done and communicate it with confidence to the community that they’re doing the right thing for kids,” Ziporyn said.

San Francisco Unified, for example, worked with operations experts at the Yale School of Management, Georgia Tech University and Northwestern University to redesign their bus routes in response to the change. With more than 120 schools and 18 different start times, the district generated about 1,000 new feasible bus schedules, which ended up saving the district about $5 million and with a majority of families and staff members satisfied with the transition to later start times, according to a report by Yale Insights. 

But most schools in California did not have access to dedicated consultants to ease the transition, Ziporyn said.

“California could have improved making these resources more readily available to the districts,” Ziporyn said. “Built into the law was that there was supposed to be help from the state Department of Education about getting this done, and building that community buy-in is part of it.”

Giuntella said the state can improve its implementation of SB 328 by collecting statewide data on later school start times to “assess the impact of the reform.” In the meantime, schools can take from the study that later start times are “effective and powerful tools” for student outcomes.

“This happens often with some shock to individual and families’ habits, and so it also requires the ability to navigate this transition in a way that doesn’t backfire,” Giuntella said.

Erik and Lyle Menendez may get another chance at parole — and a bit sooner than expected.

The brothers were convicted of murder for the August 1989 shotgun killings of their parents in their Beverly Hills home. They’ve been held in prison for more than three decades.

On Monday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation revealed the brothers had been granted a parole suitability hearing tentatively scheduled for March 2027. Previously, the state had determined they would not get another parole hearing until August 2028.

The Menendez family issued a statement Monday, expressing appreciation to the Parole Board for recognizing the brothers’ efforts to change themselves and help others in prison.

“For almost 40 years, Erik and Lyle have worked to take responsibility for their actions, confront and heal from the unimaginable abuse and trauma they endured, grow as individuals, and dedicate themselves to serving others,” the statement read.

It continued: “Through efforts such as helping to establish a hospice program and creating Green Space, they have sought to build an environment that reminds people serving life sentences that their lives still have meaning and that, regardless of their circumstances, they can choose each day to grow, heal, accept accountability, and contribute something of value to the world around them.”

Background

Erik Menendez was 18 years old at the time of the murders. He’s now 55.

Lyle Menendez is now 58. He was 21 in 1989.

The brothers were tried twice in the 1990s in connection with the killings of their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez. The brothers claimed they were sexually abused by their father, a wealthy business and former music executive, and that their mother had been complicit.

The first trial ended in a hung jury and a mistrial.

The defense argued that the brothers believed their lives were in danger at the time of the killings, and that their actions were not murder but imperfect self defense, meaning they genuinely believed the danger was imminent even if they were wrong.

In the second trial, the sexual abuse evidence was limited, and the jury reached a verdict.

The brothers were sentenced to life in prison without parole.

A chance at parole

After they spent decades in prison, the brothers' asked the court for a hearing that would give them a chance at getting out. A judge later resentenced each of them to 50 years to life, making them eligible for parole.

Last August, the brothers were denied parole for three years.

Parole commissioners said they took into account the brothers’ positive actions while in prison as well as their ages at the time of their crimes. But the commissioners also found each sibling would still pose a danger to the public if released, despite their efforts at rehabilitation.

It’s not clear why parole authorities moved up the brothers’ tentative parole suitability hearing date, but family members said they were grateful.

The family said in the statement that the move brings them “one step closer to a future with [the brothers] that once seemed impossible.”