The Brief

When a Los Angeles police officer fatally shot a 40-year-old man in his parents’ Koreatown home last month, it was clear to many, including officers at the scene, that he was experiencing a mental health crisis.

Earlier that day, Yong Yang’s mother had called the L.A. County Department of Mental Health to get help for her son, who had gone to the parents’ home because he was feeling paranoid and unsafe, according to family members. Yang’s family said he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder more than a decade ago.

The situation intensified after a worker with the Department of Mental Health — who had been dispatched to the scene — called 911, claiming Yang had attacked him.

When police arrived, they tried to get Yang to leave the apartment, but he refused, according to police. A short time later, one of the officers shot Yang, who was in his parents’ living room holding a kitchen knife.

Yang died at the scene.

So far, there have been 14 shootings by LAPD this year, three of which involved people the department said appeared to be dealing with mental illness or were having a mental health crisis at the time of the incident.

An important distinction in the Yang case is that his family called county authorities, not city police, on the day of the incident, seeking a type of alternative crisis response that does not necessarily involve police officers.

But police were called anyway.

Yong Yang pictured with his parents Myung Sook and Min Yang.

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Courtesy of the Yang family.

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“Everything went wrong. Mental health people, police, they were not in the mood to help,” Yang’s father Min Yang said in an interview with LAist. “And I was too naive and stupid that I trusted those people and put my son’s life in such a grave danger.”

The Department of Mental Health said it could not comment on the specifics of the May 2 incident because it is still under investigation. But county authorities did provide an emailed statement in which they explained that crisis teams are trained to de-escalate situations without police, but sometimes they need assistance.

“In instances where de-escalation through clinical means is not possible, and the person in crisis remains an imminent threat to themselves or others, despite DMH’s efforts, law enforcement will be contacted to maintain safety and attempt to keep the peace,” the department said.

Between January and May of this year, the county dispatched teams to nearly 8,870 calls throughout the region, about 550 of which — about 6% — resulted in a mental health worker calling law enforcement.

A recent LAist investigation found that between 2017 and 2023, 31% of shootings by L.A. city police involved a person perceived by officers to be living with mental illness or experiencing a mental health crisis, according to annual use-of-force reports.

The shooting in Koreatown

Yang’s family members said they knew he was having a bipolar episode when they called for help on May 2. The night before the incident, they said, Yang was not sleeping, he spoke erratically in conversations and was possibly hearing voices.

At some point that night, the parents left and went to Min Yang’s office and later slept in their car to give their son some space to calm down, the father said.

The next day, Yong Yang’s mother, Myung Sook Yang, called the Department of Mental Health. She said she and Yang’s father were worried because Yang's condition did not seem to have improved and he seemed to not recognize her when she came to the apartment door.

Myung Sook Yang regrets calling the Department of Mental Health and believes her son was treated like a suspect rather than a patient who needed care. "There are so many mentally ill people who need help," she said. "So now, where they can get help?"

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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A baby photo of twin brothers Yin and Yong Yang shortly after they arrived to the United States from South Korea.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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A clinician and a medical case worker with a Psychiatric Mobile Response Team went to the family’s home, according to the county.

According to audio released by LAPD, the clinician called 911, claiming that Yang was “very violent” and tried to attack him and Yang’s father.

Yang’s father told LAist he disputes that claim.

It’s not clear from the audio what behaviors the clinician reported to police, and no video was released that shows what happened at the Yangs’ home before police arrived.

Body-worn camera footage shows two police officers arriving on scene and speaking with Yang’s father. He tells the officers that his son needs to go to a hospital.

Myung Sook Yang and Min Yang walk into their apartment where their son Yong was killed by an LAPD officer during a mental health crisis.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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One officer asks Yong Yang to open the door to the apartment. He can be heard in the video saying, “I do not invite you.” He does not open the door.

About 20 minutes later, a supervising officer arrives and explains to Yang’s father that Yang “might get hurt” if police have to go into the apartment and forcibly detain him.

The supervisor talks to Yang through the front door. A voice responds: ”I’ve already been killed multiple times.”

Moments later, the officer says, “All right, we’re gonna have a use of force.”

Later, an officer uses a key to unlock the door. The officer pushes it open, but someone appears to be pushing the door from the other side.

Two officers eventually push the door open. They find Yang in the living room, holding a knife.

“You’re gonna get shot!” one of the officers yells, according to the video. Officers tell Yang to drop the knife.

He initially steps away from the officers but then takes a few steps toward them.

Yong Yang with his father, Min.

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Courtesy of the Yang family.

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Within 10 seconds of opening the door, an officer opens fire, hitting Yang. Police said they found narcotics at the scene, but did not provide details.

The officer was identified as Andres Lopez. It wasn’t his first shooting while on-duty. According to the county District Attorney’s Office, Lopez shot and wounded 35-year-old Nakiea Brown in 2021 outside LAPD’s Olympic station. Brown was holding a BB pellet gun at the time of the incident.

The shooting was not fatal. According to the D.A.’s Office, Brown had one prior contact with the LAPD’s Mental Evaluation Unit in May 2020.

After reviewing the incident, the District Attorney's Office determined the shooting was justified.

‘It could have been avoided’ 

In the interview with LAist, Yang’s family questioned why the officers did not use a bean-bag rifle, Taser or other tool to help them detain Yang without fatally shooting him.

Based on the video footage, it does not appear that police used any less-lethal weapons to try to take Yang into custody. At least one officer appears to be holding a foam projectile gun.

The LAPD has said its Mental Evaluation Unit was notified before the shooting, but it’s unclear whether a SMART unit, one of the department’s specially trained mental health crisis teams, arrived on scene. When asked for that information, the department said LAist would have to file a public records request to obtain it.

LAist has submitted that request.

Retired police Lt. Jeffrey Wenninger reviewed the LAPD’s video of the Yang shooting at the LAist’s request. He spent 30 years with the LAPD and said he has investigated hundreds of use-of-force incidents.

Wenninger commended the officers for requesting backup soon after they arrived at the scene, but he said dispatchers and officers could have asked better questions about Yang’s mental health background and what might have worked to calm him down.

Wenninger also questioned why officers decided to forcibly enter the apartment, especially because Yang was alone inside the home.

“I would say in this case, a lack of planning certainly influenced the outcome here,” he said. “It was pretty predictable to a trained eye what was going to happen.

“I 100% believe it could have been avoided.”

Ed Obayashi, a Modoc County sheriff’s deputy and use-of-force expert who advises law enforcement agencies, also reviewed the video. He told LAist he believed lethal force was justified in this case because Yang was armed with a knife. He said the allegation that the clinician was attacked also changed the scenario.

“In this situation there was an actual threat in the use of physical force, assault by the individual against innocent civilians, and at that point, yes, we need to address the situation,” Obayashi said.

The Yang family questions the LAPD's tactics that led up to the killing of Yong Yang while he was experiencing a mental health crisis.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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‘I would just suffer’ 

 
In his parent’s dining room, steps away from the living room where Yang was shot, a photo of Yong Yang and his twin brother, Yin Yang, hangs on the wall. The photo shows the two young boys sitting together in the sunlight.

“In Korean culture, they’re really big on the older brother, younger brother thing,” Yin Yang said. “They always said I’m older, because I’m two minutes [older], but in recent years he was the more respectable one.”

Yong Yang studied music production at the Musician's Institute – College of Contemporary Music in Hollywood.

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Courtesy of the Yang family.

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One of Yong Yang’s goals in life, according to his brother, was to make it as a musician and producer. He was a good singer, who loved electronic dance music. As a kid growing up in the ‘90s, he loved R&B singers, like Boyz II Men.

He attended the Musician's Institute – College of Contemporary Music in Hollywood, where he studied music production, his brother said.

Yang first started showing symptoms of mental illness about 15 years ago. His father said Yang was diagnosed with bipolar disorder around 2012.

Over the years Yang managed his bipolar diagnosis with meditation, exercise and his Christian faith, according to his family.

Yin Yang said he thinks mental health professionals and the police could have done much more to try and calm his brother down before he was shot, and he is critical of the mental health care system, which he said doesn’t offer the support people need.

Twin brothers Yong and Yin Yang as teenagers.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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"As a twin brother, it's hard. Becasue I feel like he's my other half. And it's gone, it's just taken from me," said Yin Yang.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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The brother said he thinks law enforcement too often escapes any consequences for fatally shooting someone. “And it’s usually these mentally ill people because they don’t have the ability to stand up for themselves and there’s not a lot of, like, sympathy for them in the public,” he said.

Earlier this month, Yin Yang organized a rally to call attention to the case. He also started an Instagram account to get the word out about his brother. He said many members of the Korean community in L.A. have been supportive of the family and their calls for answers from the city and county.

“As his twin brother, it’s hard. Because I feel like he’s my other half. And it’s gone, it’s just taken from me,” he said.

Yang’s father said he was sorry that his request for help led to his son’s sudden death. “He didn’t know that’s going to happen. I didn’t know. He must have thought that he was well-protected in his parents’ home,” the father said.

Yang’s mother said she thought she was doing the right thing when she called for a mental health crisis team instead of calling 911. If she had another chance, she said, he would not have called anybody for help.

“I would just suffer,” she said. “There are so many mentally ill people who need help. So now, where they can get help?”

Beyond the Rose Bowl and historic bungalows, Pasadena has stranger tales to tell. David Kalbeitzer has been seeking out those stories where rocket science meets the occult and ghosts haunt the city’s grandest buildings.

For Kalbeitzer, a Disney executive who investigates the paranormal in his free time, his fascination with the city’s mysterious side started when he bought a Victorian north of Old Town.

He sensed a spirit at the open house a dozen years ago and took it as a reason to move his family to Pasadena. Then he started learning the city’s history.

David Kalbeitzer, a paranormal investigator from Pasadena, is giving a talk about the city's strange history Saturday night in Old Town.

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Courtesy of David Kalbeitzer

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“I realized, ‘Oh, this place called us just as much as we were looking for it,’” he said.

On Saturday night, he’s sharing the lore he’s collected at Mesmer Mesmer an Old Town shop and event space. While the event is full, there’s a waitlist, and more talks featuring Kalbeitzer are in the works.

A city of ghost stories 

Ask Kalbeitzer about haunted Pasadena, and the list stretches from alleyways to the Colorado Street Bridge to Castle Green, the turreted former hotel overlooking Central Park.

“The Pasadena Playhouse theater is, you know, very haunted,” he added.

He says theatergoers have reported hearing disembodied voices.

Theatergoers over the years have described hearing voices and seeing apparitions at the Pasadena Playhouse.

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Jeff Lorch

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Courtesy of Pasadena Playhouse

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“And you look, and there’s no one there, or apparitions that have been seen sort of standing in the corner, and then you walk up, and they kind of disappear like shadowy figures,” he said.

As for the spirit that helped draw him to his current Pasadena home?

Kalbeitzer says she’s still around — and his psychic friend Michael Kouri shared her name: Dolores.

“It’s actually haunted by a very kind ghost that looks out for the house, protects my family and has been able to activate our alarm,” he said.

Having a Dolores in the house might send some people running, but Kalbeitzer said he grew up in a haunted house in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

And when his family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a teenage Kalbeitzer started seeking out places known for paranormal activity.

Rocket science, ritual magic and mind-reading

Having lived in different neighborhoods in L.A., Kalbeitzer says there’s something uniquely otherworldly about Pasadena — and it goes beyond ghost stories.

He said the city has an energy that draws people exploring the unknown, perhaps most famously Jack Parsons.

The rocket pioneer who helped launch the Jet Propulsion Laboratory also practiced ritual magic at his Pasadena home with the likes of L. Ron Hubbard before he founded Scientology.

“Many people call it the occult," Kalbeitzer said. "I don’t know that I fully subscribe to that, but there is spiritualism and occult mixed in there."

Then there was Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle, whose interests while living in Pasadena extended to telepathy and séances.

Upton Sinclair, pictured with his wife Mary Craig Sinclair in 1935, several years after he published a book examining her reported telepathy.

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Los Angeles Times via Wikimedia Commons

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In 1930, Sinclair published Mental Radio, a book about experiments in mind-reading. Albert Einstein provided a preface. Yes, that Einstein, who would spend the following winter at Caltech expanding on the theories of relativity and cosmology.

“It’s the craziest mixture of things that were happening at that time and all of it at the same time,” Kalbeitzer said.

A presence in the shop 

The event couldn’t have found a more appropriate venue.

Since opening five months ago in Old Town, Mesmer Mesmer has embraced the dark and mysterious, offering tarot and crystal readings and hosting events on subjects such as hip-hop’s relationship with ghosts.

Tyke O'Brien opened her shop Mesmer Mesmer earlier this year to create a third space and offer books and esoterica alongside clothing.

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Tyke O'Brien

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At that event, a medium told owner Tyke O’Brien she could sense a presence in the shop, which formerly housed a bridal store.

“She goes, ‘Do you ever feel it?’ And I’m like, ‘I am such a bummer,” O’Brien recounted. “I wish I could say yes."

The same can be said for this writer who’s lived and worked in and around Pasadena for years without so much as a brush with the otherworldly.

Kalbeitzer, on the other hand, reports supernatural encounters all around town.

“Everyone has the ability to have those experiences," he said. "But I do think how you see yourself in the world has a lot more to do with it, and whether you want to have those experiences."

Los Angeles officials expect construction of a fence around MacArthur Park will start in November and continue through fall 2027. 

At a community meeting Thursday night at MacArthur Park Elementary School, officials said fence installation is now expected to continue through fall 2027, overshooting the previously announced spring 2027 completion date.

Thursday’s meeting highlighted the divide over the city’s plan to fence off MacArthur Park, with tensions rising during public comment. The Los Angeles Police Department says the fence will make drug enforcement easier, while some in the community who volunteer around the park questioned whether it will improve safety enough to justify the cost.

The city has allocated $2.3 million for the project, but officials have not said whether that will cover the full cost.

Installation of the green metal fence around the park’s perimeter is expected to begin in November and take about a year. A second phase, adding decorative elements to the fence, is planned for fall and winter 2027. Officials said the schedule could change because of weather or other unforeseen circumstances.

The park is expected to remain open during construction.

Capt. Ben Fernandes with the LAPD’s Rampart Division said the fence would create a barrier along Alvarado Street and other areas where officers have seen people using narcotics. That would allow police to focus more of their enforcement efforts inside the park, he said.

“So if people are going deeper into the park to use, that’ll make it easier for us to go in and do enforcement on them and arrest them for that use,” Fernandes said. 

MacArthur Park will close every night once an 8-foot-tall fence goes up around the green space, with Los Angeles police officers sweeping the park for encampments and people sleeping there before the gates shut. The Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners approved the plan Thursday.

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LA Recreation and Parks

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“I’ve been an officer for 29 years, and I’ve always known I can go buy drugs there, and I did as a narcotics officer. So what I’m saying is, we are trying to make it not convenient,” he added. 

Fernandes also said the city plans to enhance the park’s existing camera network. LAPD officers and Los Angeles Park Rangers will be able to monitor the cameras from their respective stations, he said. City officials are still evaluating whether additional cameras will be needed to address blind spots in the park after construction is complete.

Ariana Walker, who visits MacArthur Park every Saturday with a group of friends who pool their own resources to distribute food and hygiene kits, questioned whether the city had shown that the fence would improve safety and how much it would cost to maintain.

“The fence is a $2.3 million fence at the base level,” she said. “And they haven’t given us any indication of how much more it’s going to cost for upkeep, to keep anybody safe. There’s no conclusive evidence that a fence is going to stop crime the way that they’re suggesting.”

The meeting grew tense when John Alle, a local property owner whose family owns the building that houses Langer’s Delicatessen across the street from the park, objected to having his comments read from a written comment card rather than speaking directly to officials. Alle has been a vocal critic of the city’s response to drug activity and public safety concerns around MacArthur Park.

He was allowed to comment during the meeting and said the city needs to take a tougher approach to drug use and sales around the park. 

“We see knife attacks at all hours of the day. It’s out of control. And it’s not gotten any better,” he said. “We want to bring it back to where it was 15 or 20 years ago.”

Los Angeles officials expect construction of a fence around MacArthur Park will start in November and continue through fall 2027.

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Gary Coronado

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The LA Local

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Alle pointed to public events at the park, including an upcoming Día de los Muertos celebration and a Labor Day weekend picnic hosted by Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman as positive developments for the space. But he added those events do not reflect conditions throughout the park.

Officials also outlined other planned improvements, including restoring access through the tunnels connecting the park’s north and south sides, making accessibility upgrades and providing free Wi-Fi for parkgoers. 

Residents who want to provide input on the fence’s decorative elements can email admin@themorcosgroup.com or call (310) 479-4727 for more information.

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