The Brief

On a warm October morning in 2021, three men and one woman met in a squat, unassuming building in a working-class neighborhood in the middle of Los Angeles.

They were four of the most powerful people in the city: Ron Herrera, the head of a prominent union group, and three L.A. city council members: Gil Cedillo, Kevin de León and then-council president Nury Martinez. They didn’t know it at the time, but everything they were saying was being secretly recorded.

For the next 90 minutes, the four Latino leaders would speak candidly using demeaning and racist terms about colleagues on the council, Black political power, indigenous people and even a child — all within the context of a meeting held to strategize how to advance Latino power in the city.

A year later, on Oct. 9, 2022, that recording was leaked to the public.

When the media began publishing excerpts from the tape, they shook Los Angeles to its core. It led to protests outside — and inside — City Hall and at the homes of the people on the tape. There were calls for resignation from fellow council members, national politicians, and even the president of the United States.

Now, in her first interview since the scandal broke, we pressed former L.A. City Council President Nury Martinez about the racist and offensive things she said.

We also asked Martinez to engage and think through how her comments were connected to the larger systemic issues of anti-Black racism and colorism in the Latino community. Over the course of our six-hour interview, Martinez largely declined to do so.

“I don't even know if I'm the right person to even have these conversations anymore,” she said in Episode 2, “because I've been tainted in such a way where I don't even know if I would even be welcome. Even in this conversation, I feel really scared and nervous to even dive into that.”

She also discussed her experience of the scandal and how it has affected her mental health.

Antonia Cereijido and Martinez spoke over the course of two days at LAist’s Pasadena studio. The conversation below has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Listen to more in LAist Studios’ Imperfect Paradise podcast. The series includes interviews with those who were most impacted by the hurtful comments on the tape including former L.A. city councilmember Mike Bonin, current councilmembers Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Eunisses Hernandez and Nithya Raman, indigenous human rights organizer Odilia Romero, and Professor Tanya Hernández, who has written about anti-Blackness in the Latinx community.

Learning about the tapes, and the decision to resign

Antonia Cereijido: Let's talk about the day when the tapes were published. When did you hear about the tapes and their existence?

Nury Martinez: I was having coffee with my husband at our kitchen table, and it's about 9 or 9:30 a.m. when I get a phone call. My then-chief of staff, Alexis Wesson, calls me and says, “there is a tape.”

And her exact words were, “Do you remember wearing Doc Martens to a meeting?”

[Note: One of the first things Martinez says on the tape is that she’s wearing Doc Martens].

I go, “Doc Martens? Like the shoes? I have Doc Martens, but I don't know what you're talking about.”

She goes, “Someone found tapes of you where apparently you're at some meeting and you're wearing Doc Martens because you mentioned Doc Martens in the meeting.” And I was like, ‘I have no idea what you're talking about.’”

By 8:30 or 9:30 a.m. the next day, which was now Oct. 9, there's a story in the L.A. Times, and now by this time I'm getting phone calls from folks asking me what this is about. By that time it's now clear to me that the meeting they're talking about is the Oct. 18, 2021 meeting that the four of us held at the County Federation of Labor. And now it's like, who taped this? Who could have done this?

By that Sunday, the protesting had begun. I had people at my front door on my driveway shouting just absolute obscenities into my child's bedroom, calling me the C word. “You, you racist C word, you effing B word. We're gonna kill you, you should die.” It was all happening really, really fast.

Protestors demonstrate outside City Hall calling for the resignations of L.A. City Council members Kevin de Leon and Gil Cedillo in the wake of a leaked audio recording on Oct. 12, 2022.

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I had already internally, even though I did not say this to anyone, I had already accepted that this was so big that there is nothing that I could say or do to undo this and that I needed to step down. A hundred percent. I knew that there was gonna be consequences, that I needed to pay for this.

On Joe Biden, Karen Bass and Alex Padilla

Over the next 48 hours, dozens of elected officials called for the resignations of Martinez, Cedillo and de León, including U.S. Senator Alex Padilla and former Congressmember Karen Bass, who was, at the time, running for mayor of L.A. Martinez had recently endorsed Bass for mayor, and she was close with Padilla and his family; they went to the same high school in San Fernando, and Padilla’s brother, Ackley Padilla, was her former chief of staff.

On Oct. 11, 2022, President Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said during a press conference, “the president is glad to see that one of the participants in that conversation has resigned. But they all should. He believes that they all should resign. The language that was used and tolerated during that conversation was unacceptable and it was appalling. They should all step down.”

NM: During the first 24 hours of the tapes being leaked, Karen Bass did reach out to me and we talked several times. She was very supportive. And at one point I said, “if you have to renounce my endorsement, I will completely understand.” She didn't think we needed to do that the first 24 hours.

And she actually thought that somehow this would settle down or blow over in about one or two days. And we were actually expecting President Biden in Los Angeles that Thursday, and I was supposed to have a fundraiser, a Latino fundraiser for her that Saturday as well. When I talked to her on the phone, I'm like, “What do we do about President Biden's visit? Do I not show up? Like, what do you want me to do?” She's like, “No, we're moving forward. You show up.” And, you know, thinking this was gonna blow over.

I wanted to believe her, but I think deep down in my heart, I'm like, there is no way that this is gonna blow over. She also reached out to Ron Herrera for a possible press conference with the two of us. And then that didn't go anywhere. She was discouraged by a group of ministers, I think. But the intent of her standing with us was there. And I appreciate it.

Bass called me afterwards and she said, did you see Senator Alex Padilla's statement? I said, “No.” She goes, “It's bad.”

Alex never shared his statement with me. We did have a conversation. In fact, I was curled up in the bathroom when I took Alex's phone call, like at seven in the morning [on Monday], and he was really hard on me. And I was trying to explain what had happened and I wasn't getting through. And all I kept saying is, “But you know me.” And I might've said, “I don't know if I can withstand this, I'm scared.” And I didn't hear anything back.

U.S. Senator Alex Padilla. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

And soon after that, the cries for resignation were so loud. I then got on the phone with [L.A. city councilmember] Paul Krekorian and told him that I was gonna step down as council president.

AC: What strikes me about how you're describing those couple of days is that it sounds like you were sort of in “logistics brain.” But in terms of sitting down and thinking about why people were upset about the tapes, or processing, was that going through your mind?

NM: Oh yeah. That went through my mind, at night 'cause I wasn't sleeping. And so the first thing I attempted to do is take full responsibility and apologize, which I know was not accepted at the time, and then fix what I had done. Of course, I thought about what this has done. Of course I thought about Mike's baby. Of course. But once phone calls kept coming in, I didn't necessarily feel comfortable with these people on the phone. I didn't know if I was being recorded. I didn't know if they were talking to the press. So I didn't talk about these things with anybody on the phone. The only thing I knew how to do is hand over my responsibilities as a council president and make sure that I didn't mess up anything else.

AC: How did it feel to hear that President Biden had weighed in?

NM: I was in shock. I wanna believe that he had to do it because he was coming into Los Angeles on that Thursday. Maybe he just wanted to get it out of the way. That's what I thought.

Senator Padilla told us he does not dispute Nury’s account of this call. LAist reached out repeatedly to Mayor Bass, described this story to her spokesperson and asked for her comment, but we never heard back. In a later interview with LAist’s Larry Mantle, Bass denied she thought it would blow over, and added, “even if it was, I wanna take a crisis and seize it as an opportunity.”

Redistricting and Black political power

In another part of the tape, the four Latino leaders discuss redistricting, the once in a decade process of drawing new city council district lines. 

They focus on Council District 9, a majority Latino district in South L.A. that’s currently represented by a Black man, Curren Price. They care about this district because it’s become the district with the highest percentage of Latino residents in the city, and they think it will be represented by a Latino in the future. They want District 9 to have some good economic “assets,” like universities, stadiums, airports, etc, that are tied to good union jobs and bring resources into the district.  And they’re concerned the redistricting commission might take some of those “assets” away.

In particular, the four people in the room wanted the University of Southern California – USC – to remain in Council District 9. But that would mean leaving Council District 8, which is also right next door to USC in South LA, with very few economic assets. 

District 8 has the highest percentage of Black residents in the city. On the tape, Martinez proposed that Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents Council District 8 take LAX from his “brother,” Mike Bonin, whose district included the airport. Some people interpreted this as the four Latino leaders scheming to keep resources out of the hands of the Black community. 

AC: For me, listening to the tapes, just the fact that you do hear redistricting talked about in these racialized terms and it does sound like there's a zero sum. Like, “us Latinos get this, Black people get this.” I think it was shocking for the average person to hear that. I wanna give you the opportunity to respond to that.

NM: That wasn't the intent, and I think … of course, it's shocking. It makes people angry.

I think the Latino community, particularly that the Latino leaders in Los Angeles, have been incredibly cognizant about not starting a war over these seats, that eventually these seats will flip and they will turn Latino because that's what they're trending. But we as leaders in Los Angeles have never engaged in trying to, for example, run a Latino candidate against an African American candidate. I don't remember the time that I've been on the city council that I have not supported an African American colleague or an African American friend who happens to be running for that seat. And so that is, I think the misperception about why we were in that room is that there is this false narrative that we were meeting to dilute or take away political power from the African American community. And that's simply not true.

AC: Do you think Black people have disproportionate political power in Los Angeles and do you think it's come at the expense of Latinos?

NM: Not necessarily. I think the Latinos need to work on unifying our community. I don't think we have to blame anybody else. I think it's up to us to get people to turn out to vote.

AC: One thing that comes through in the tapes is that there's sort of a positioning of like, it's like white liberals in L.A. are allied with Black progressives and like Latinos seem left out. Do you think that's an accurate–

NM: You know what, I don't, I don't know if that was an accurate description of it.

I will tell you that the conversation and other conversations we've had as Latinos is, Latinos are becoming more and more invisible.

And that is something that I saw not only in the media, but I see in politics. I see in everyday life. When you turn on the television, our stories are not being told. And when we do tell them and when we are frustrated, even in a private conversation, it's turned against us. Like we don't have a right as a community to advocate for ourselves because somehow that goes against another ethnic group. I don't know why we do that.

AC: The way the Latino and Black community were talked about was like a zero sum game. Like there's a Latino seat and there's a Black seat, and that would negate Afro-Latinos as a community. I don't know if when you say Latinos, if you think of the Afro-Latino community.

NM: No, I can't say I do, but it's not on purpose. ‘Cause Afro-Latinos, particularly in Los Angeles ... I think you see more Afro-Latinos in Florida and New York and DC.

On L.A. District Attorney George Gascón

On the tape, Martinez disparages L.A. district attorney George Gascón, saying, “F*** that guy. I'm telling you now, he's with the Blacks.” Gascón was elected in 2020 on a platform of criminal justice reform and ending mass incarceration in the city. 

L.A. district attorney George Gascón,

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AC: You said, “Gascón, he's with the Blacks.” What does that mean?

NM: You know, I walked in there really angry and frustrated and it was, it was a mean and insensitive thing to say, and I didn't mean anything by it.

The conversation that we were having didn't have to do with Gascón himself, just had to do with so much of the frustration and anger that I was carrying with me inside me when I walked into that room. And that is no fault of the African American community.

It's just everything that was going on during COVID, with me as council president, the lack of support for what we were trying to do on the council, the amount of personal attacks against me, my leadership and my family were taking a toll on me. And that was it. There is absolutely no excuse for us. I think I let my anger and my frustration get the best of me, and that was it.

AC: There was no policy issue that you –

NM: No. I have absolutely no relationship with him whatsoever.

Racist comments about former Councilmember Mike Bonin's son

On the tape, Martinez told a story about being on a float during L.A.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade in 2017 with a number of elected officials and their family members, including Karen Bass, Karrie Harris-Dawson, who is married to councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, former city councilmember Mike Bonin and his son, Jacob, who was then a toddler. According to Martinez, the women were discussing Jacob’s behavior on the float. In recounting the story during the meeting that was secretly recorded, Martinez described Jacob, who is Black, by saying, “parece changuito,” which means, “he seems like a little monkey.” 

Martinez and the other leaders on the tape also described how Bonin would bring Jacob to city council and other events during Black History Month, which Kevin de León compared to Martinez bringing her designer handbags to council meetings. Herrera suggested the child was a prop and a statue on a plantation, and Martinez compared him to an accessory. Martinez later said, “Ahí trae su negrito, like on the side,” which means, “there he brings his little Black one.” 

AC: What did you mean when you said, about Mike Bonin’s son, “parece changuito”?

NM: The way I grew up with that word, “parece changuito." It has nothing to do with skin color. It has more to do with behavior. You're sort of just playing around. You're horsing around. Another word that we use in Spanish, “es travieso” [mischievous], you can’t stay put.

It's a conversation I should not have repeated. And I think that's an example of a bunch of moms sitting around you know, being critical of little boys' behavior. That was my mistake.

It was insensitive. It was mean. I never meant to hurt Jacob, and I'm going to have to live with that for the rest of my life, you know? I've never romanticized motherhood. Anybody who knows me and has been around me knows my child is also pretty wild. And now she's a teenager and it's even crazier at a different level. I've never romanticized parenthood. It's really, really hard. And I've been around those moms who sometimes we're critical of other children and we kind of talk smack about with one another. We're moms, right? I never meant to hurt Jacob. I thought about this a hundred times of what I would say to him if I would see him.

Former councilmember Mike Bonin photographed in his home.

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AC: What would you say?

NM: I would hug him. [I would say,] “I never meant to hurt you baby. That was never my intent. It was a conversation I had with four women that I should not have repeated.”

AC: Had you used that particular word [changuito] to describe children before?

NM: Yes, in my family, yes. In fact, my mother said that to me. It was common when I was growing up, and my mom actually pointed that out to me when the tapes broke. She said we used that word at home. [I told her] my mistake was that I was referencing an African American baby and I shouldn't have done that.

AC:  Why do you think it's different to say it about a Black kid versus a kid of another race?

NM: I did not mean it in a derogatory way, and it wasn't meant to describe him as a Black child. That was not the intent of the word.

AC: But do you understand why is it that that word specifically is offensive when talked about a Black kid versus another kid?

NM: Oh, a hundred percent.

AC: No, just the why –

NM: The word was not meant to be derogatory, and I was not describing him in that way because he is a Black child. I was simply referring to his behavior and that was it.

AC: Mike Bonin and [councilmember] Marqueece Harris-Dawson told me that the way you were talking about Jacob on the float is what a lot of people do to Black boys, treating him like he's older, like he has more agency or responsibility than he really does. What do you think about that characterization?

Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson photographed near USC.

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NM: No, I think it was just moms just being critical of you know, a rowdy kid. Just like they would’ve been of my own kid. That was just us being moms.

AC: Would you have used that word in English?

NM: Never. Never have I ever used those words in English. I think in Spanish, then I speak in English. And so my vocabulary comes from me being an English learner. And I think for me, those words are not meant to hurt anybody, or to sound racist at all. I think it's just words that I grew up with.

Racist comments about Oaxacans

The four leaders discussed Koreatown, a neighborhood in Los Angeles that has a large Indigenous Mexican population. On the tape, Herrera says, “my mom used to call them indios.” 

Martinez says, “I see a lot of little short dark people,” and, “I don’t know where these people are from, like I don’t know what village they came out of, how they got here, but, tán [short for están] feos!,” which means, “they’re ugly.”

Protesters dance outside City Hall while calling for the resignations of L.A. City Council members Kevin de Leon and Gil Cedillo in the wake of a leaked audio recording on Oct. 12, 2022 in Los Angeles.

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AC: So the next part of the tapes I want to talk about is actually the part that, knowing your personal and political history, I was most surprised to hear, and that was your comments about Oaxacans. What did you mean when you called them ‘tan feos’?

NM: Oh my goodness. That's another thing that I will never forgive myself for. That was just a horrible, insensitive thing to say. I certainly don't have anything against the Oaxacan community. I feel horrible for having insulted the community.

AC: Do you think there's a colorism problem in Latino communities?

NM: Yes. Yes. I think there is. I think we're getting better and certainly my comments didn't help.

AC: So you, you don't think though, that you harbor a bias against people with darker skin?

NM: No way.

Anti-Black bias in the Latino/x community

AC:, I'm curious, looking back, why do you think you said that? Where was it coming from? Have you thought about why you said what you said?

NM: I've thought about that particular day, God, a thousand times, if not more. I was so frustrated. It's so angry and so alone and so abandoned by, by just, by everyone, particularly other members. And I think that over the two and a half years that I was council president, I just grew more frustrated and angry and pissed off at everything. And that's what you saw. That's it.

AC:  I understand the frustration, but I think there's like a difference between being frustrated and saying things that are insensitive, like you said. And so what I'm trying to do with this interview is unpack where the things were coming from. Because I think that there are a lot of internal biases that we as Latinos hold in the community that people picked up on, and they wanted to use it as an example to talk about this larger conversation about race. Do you think there's an anti-Blackness problem in the Latino community?

NM: I don't know. I mean, that's a really good question. I never felt we had one, um, on the council. Just speaking personally. My personal experience, that's all I can speak to.

AC: Do you think that there is a conversation to be had about anti-Blackness in the Latino community?

NM: Not in my household. Those conversations, um, have never, we've never had to have those conversations 'cause we've never felt that way. And that's just me personally. I don't know about other households or what else is happening in other communities, but I certainly have never felt that.

AC: One of the things that did happen was this larger conversation about how we talk about race in our communities and in many ways I think that part of it is good, like that we have to try more to have–

NM: You know, I wish I could dive more into that, because what this has caused for me is I don't even know if I'm the right person to even have these conversations anymore. 'Cause I've been tainted in such a way where I don't even know if I would even be welcome on a panel or in a group conversation to really dive into these issues, to figure out how we really feel about this. Because of what, how I've been perceived and characterized, that I could even in this conversation — I'm very worried, um, and feel really scared and nervous to even dive into that, if that makes any sense.

I'm not avoiding your question, but I'm just really scared to answer it. What if I say the wrong thing and now we're back to square one? I do not know if today I'm the right person to have those conversations. Do I believe they need to be had? Yes. I'm just being honest. I just don't know how to answer that.

The tape leak

In California, secretly recording a private conversation is a crime. The LAPD is investigating who recorded the meeting. Over the summer, Los Angeles Magazine and the L.A. Times reported that the police were investigating a former employee of the LA County Federation of Labor and his wife, who also worked there. The LAPD declined to comment or provide LAist with an update into the investigation.

In October 2022, a Reddit user named Honest-Finding-1581 posted nine pieces of audio – portions of various conversations that were secretly recorded in the L.A. County Federation of Labor a year or so earlier, which is how journalists discovered the tapes.

NM: I have always felt that as a Latina, I have never really been given a fair shake by the media. The coverage of these tapes in and of itself, says it all. I think there was a deliberate concerted effort to take snippets of the conversation and put them out to the general public. I have not found anyone who said to me, “I actually listened to the entire thing to get some context about what was taking place.”

AC: So you think if it had been presented whole, it wouldn't have blown up in the same way?

NM: Yeah, I do. [NOTE: The LA Times posted the full audio on YouTube within a week of publishing their first article about the tapes, and later published an annotated transcript of the full conversation.]

AC:  So what I hear you saying is that you feel like this is something that happened to you, not something you did.

NM: No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, this is a conversation that took place in a private setting out of frustration and anger for whatever, everything that was going on. And I take full responsibility for it. And there's nothing that I'm ever gonna be able to do to express how horrible I feel about it. That's what I'm saying.

On Kevin de León

Kevin de León speaks to council member Paul Krekorian on Oct. 12, 2022, during the first L.A. city council meeting after the media began reporting on the secret tapes.

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AC: What do you think about Kevin de León's decision not to resign?

NM: I think it was the right decision for him. Kevin didn't commit a crime. I think we can count how many members on the city council have been indicted to date for really troubling corruption charges. But Kevin did not commit a crime, and Kevin is not a racist.

The effect of the tape scandal on her life

NM: If it wasn't for my mom, I wouldn't even be alive. There were so many times during the first three months of what had happened where I didn't get out of bed. And I remember my mom was so scared that I would hurt myself, that she would call me every hour on the hour.

She couldn't come over 'cause there were so many cameras. And I was so ashamed that I have — I still can't talk about those horrible, dark, dark days. I would go to sleep and, I remember this, I don't wanna wake up tomorrow.

And then I would have visions of my mom burying me. And I just couldn't, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't see my mom burying me. I am not at all suggesting that all should be forgotten. Absolutely not. I think these conversations need to be had. Um, but the sense of not being worthy enough to be forgiven or to be listened to was so hard.

People make mistakes. I would hope that after this people would find a different way to hold people accountable. Um, I hope you do it differently. I don't want this to happen to anybody.

AC: What is a typical day like for you now?

NM: I see my daughter off to school and make breakfast, have a cup of coffee with my husband, talk about the day. He's also not working. So we're constantly trying to figure out what our finances are gonna look like the next month, which has been really, really hard.

On the really, really difficult days, I'll just go to church. My mom, to get me out of the house, told me, “You need to go to church and you need to go ask God to forgive you. Man isn't gonna forgive you. God is. You own up to everything you said and what you meant, and that's all you can do.”

When I would have these dark thoughts, I would get so scared that I just would jump in my car and go to church, and oftentimes I would sit there by myself and just cry. For hours. I would come home around dinner time, and I would start making dinner or lunch for my daughter after she got home from school. And that would be my day.

I journal just to get some of these things off my chest, to remind myself that I'm still a good person even though I didn't hear it at the time. That I'm worthy. That I did a lot of good work, that I helped a lot of people, that I loved my career, my job. It was my passion. And that this too shall pass. I don't know what's next, but I do believe this too shall pass. But, I just gotta just be honest. What this has done to me and my family has completely destroyed us. I don't know what's next. I know that this took my passion and my light. I don't know how to describe it in any other way besides, I'm lost.

Rebecca Katz contributed to this story.

The legal tug-of-war centers on a two-panel work called “Adam” and “Eve.” The life-size paintings depicting the biblical characters were created around 1530 by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.

The Nazis stole the two paintings, and many others, from Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker in Holland in 1940. After the war, the Dutch government sold these two works to a Russian aristocrat, who sold them to the Norton Simon in Pasadena in 1971.

“By pursuing the recovery of the Cranachs, we are seeking to reverse a great injustice perpetrated by the Nazi theft of a Jewish family’s property,” Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of Jewish Federation Los Angeles, said in a written statement.

The Federation is plaintiff in a lawsuit filed on Monday in L.A. Superior Court that names the museum and two related foundations as defendants. Cranach the Elder’s work has sold for millions of dollars.

Goudstikker’s only living heir, Marei von Saher, gave the Federation the authority to file the lawsuit. If the lawsuit is successful, the Federation pledges to use the majority of the net proceeds to care for impoverished Holocaust survivors living in the L.A. area.

Adam and Eve, painted around 1530 by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.

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Von Saher has spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to get these paintings back. But this lawsuit is different. It’s filed under a 2024 California law that gives people the ability to petition to recover cultural property “that was taken or otherwise lost as a result of political persecution,” according to the law.

Stolen painting

Responding to the lawsuit, the Norton Simon Museum did not challenge that the painting was looted by the Nazis.

“After decades of litigation, court after court including the United States Supreme Court has confirmed that the Norton Simon Art Foundation has proper title to 'Adam' and 'Eve,'" the museum said in a written statement.

The museum is referring to a 2018 ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which said that since a foreign government sold the artwork, the court could not declare that sale illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court let that decision stand without reviewing it.

The Norton Simon has been pressured to negotiate with the heirs to return the work, even from the founder’s grandson.

“In my opinion, it's immoral and unethical because they don't have good title,” said Joel Greenberg, founder of the nonprofit Art Ashes, which helps families of Holocaust survivors recover art looted from their ancestors.

It’s not the only high-profile case of Nazi-looted art in the region. The late Los Angeles resident Maria Altman recovered a work by Gustav Klimt that was looted from her family by the Nazis in Austria.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A motorist was arrested on murder charges after authorities say she slammed her SUV into a city bus in Los Angeles, killing at least two people and injuring six others in a prelude to a second deadly tragedy: the fiery crash of a TV news helicopter that was covering the collision.

Bailee Lynn Rios, 36, of Simi Valley, was arrested Tuesday night and is being held at a Los Angeles jail with bail set at $4 million, police said Wednesday. The case is being forwarded to the district attorney’s office, which will decide whether to file the charges in court or pursue different ones. Information on a lawyer who could speak on her behalf was not immediately available.

The helicopter, which was used by NBC and Telemundo, crashed about two hours after police say Rios drove her 2004 Ford Expedition the wrong way down a busy avenue, ran a red light and struck a vehicle before hitting the bus. One passenger was fully ejected from the bus and another was partially ejected, police said.

Rios’ mother, Cindy Rios, said she was shocked and saddened by the string of events. She said she had not spoken to Bailee Lynn since her arrest and had not been contacted by law enforcement.

“It’s just horrible,” Cindy Rios told The Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday. “The fact that my daughter was involved and was the cause of it is just extremely disturbing.”

“If anything, I’m sorry for the other families,” she added. “My daughter’s alive. People lost their lives.”

Chopper crash killed a reporter, a pilot and a man on the ground

NBC4 Los Angeles reported that two people aboard the helicopter — reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw — were killed when the chopper went down Tuesday in the Chatsworth neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley north of downtown.

A person on the ground, identified as 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, died in a parking lot, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office said. He was from Guatemala, the country’s consulate confirmed.

The crash happened as news crews were reporting on the collision involving the SUV that slammed into the bus.

There were no immediate details on what caused the helicopter crash, but an alarm could be heard sounding inside the helicopter’s cockpit as it lost altitude in the final seconds of video the crew broadcast before the crash.

Just after the beeping noise starts, a woman’s voice says “uh oh.” The helicopter moves quickly away from the bus crash site and starts losing altitude. The woman says “You can’t pull up?” before the video stops as the chopper nears the ground.

“That video is probably the most important evidence that we have discovered so far,” National Transportation Safety Board investigator Fabian Salazar said Wednesday at a news briefing.

Salazar said the sounds were consistent with the helicopter’s engine changing speed, as well as what he said were likely advisory tones for the pilot. The NTSB said it is also investigating the bus collision.

The helicopter, a Eurocopter AS350, went down near a large storage facility. At least four cars and two storage containers burned after the helicopter caught fire. NBC4 reporter Robert Kovacik was at the bus scene and saw black smoke and rushed to the helicopter crash site.

Anchor and reporters pay tearful tributes to deceased colleagues

Moreno was a familiar voice for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 during the station’s aerial coverage. She and Marciniw were both were employees of Angel City Air, which operated the chopper for the station.

Moreno, born in Orange County, joined Angel City Air in 2010, the same year she earned a broadcast journalism and political science degree from Chapman University. She reported for several news outlets and began flying with Marciniw in 2023, the NBC4 website said.

Marciniw grew up in Southern California and graduated from Burbank High School in 1974.

“I think a lot of us are still trying to process what happened, this terrible loss,” NBC4 reporter Lauren Coronado told viewers early Wednesday as she stood near the crash site. A hazmat crew was cleaning up jet fuel, she said.

In a tribute to Moreno and Marciniw, the newscast referred to them as “the team in the sky,” saying Moreno would often post videos from her job and was in awe of the view. Anchor Lynette Romero held a colleague’s hand and wiped away tears after hearing Moreno’s voice when one of her posts was played.

In an interview with the station, Esteban Jimenez, a pilot, said he had known Marciniw since the 1990s. He said Marciniw had been his instructor.

“I just talked to him on Sunday. We were talking about the aviation business and retiring,” he said.

Expert talks about what may have caused the crash

Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said the alarm sounding in the helicopter’s final video sounds like the low rotor RPM warning horn that signals the main rotor is no longer spinning enough to keep the helicopter in the air.

“It just has all the earmarks of a potential loss of engine power and a dangerous decrease in the main rotor speed,” said Guzzetti who used to investigate crashes for both the NTSB and FAA.

Guzzetti said the pilot appeared to be trying to perform an emergency maneuver to use the wind to force the rotor to spin again much like a breeze turns a windmill. Doing that can create a bit of lift that could help cushion the impact, but Guzzetti said there would have been little opportunity to do that because the helicopter had been hovering at a low altitude beforehand.

There are risks to news helicopters particularly in a major city like Los Angeles where multiple helicopters respond to an incident, but the pilots all coordinate closely over the radio to ensure they maintain a safe distance from each other. The industry also shares best practices to help keep these news flights safe.

“It’s a very unique form of flying. And the community is very good about lessons learned,” Guzzetti said. “And so because of that, you don’t hear about too many of those accidents. So they’re rare, but they do occur, just because the mission is a risky one.”

Other crashes involving news helicopters

The station said this is the second aviation tragedy in its history.

In 1977, a KNBC news helicopter crashed when it ran out of fuel while returning to the station after covering a wildfire in Santa Barbara, killing the pilot and camera operator. The pilot, former U.S. Air Force officer Francis Gary Powers, had been in the news years earlier when he was shot down and captured while flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union for the CIA, an ordeal portrayed in the movie “Bridge of Spies.”

There have been at least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters in the U.S. since 2000, killing 16 people, according to a review of federal accident records and news accounts.

They include a 2023 crash in a New Jersey forest that killed the pilot and a photographer aboard a helicopter used by Philadelphia station WPVI and a 2022 crash beside a Charlotte, North Carolina, interstate that killed a pilot and meteorologist during a training flight for WBTV.

A 2007 midair collision in Phoenix of two TV news helicopters that were covering a police chase led the NTSB to recommend that news helicopters have at least two people in the cockpit so the pilot can focus on flying while the reporter focuses on the story.

___

Golden reported from Seattle, and Collins from Hartford, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; and Allen Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed.

Federal and county law enforcement announced charges Wednesday against three people in a widening investigation of homelessness services fraud in the L.A. area. Prosecutors previously charged three other people and said they plan to bring “many more” cases.

In Wednesday’s announcement at a news conference, authorities alleged a bribery scheme built on "ghost" clients illustrates a yearslong problem.

"Nobody was minding the shop," the region’s top federal prosecutor, Bill Essayli, told reporters in response to a question from LAist. "There's no vetting. There's no auditing. There's no accounting. It was just a rush to push as much money out the door."

What are the charges?

Authorities arrested Michael Young — founder of the Culver City nonprofit Home At Last — and accused him of using shell companies and fake bids to misappropriate $12 million in taxpayer funds. The allegations include siphoning $1 million into a high-end nightclub, a nearly $50,000 trip to Tahiti and a $140,000 restoration of a vintage Chevy Impala.

Michael Young, 46, of Baldwin Hills

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Courtesy Department of Justice

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A headshot of Alex Soofer shared by a federal prosecutor on X.

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First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli via X

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Scott Turner, the U.S. secretary for Housing and Urban Development, said Young's group received more than $118 million in public dollars for homeless housing since 2019 — over $75 million of it through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA.

The new cases allege about $12 million in misappropriated funds — almost all of it by Young.

The bribery charges are against Lakiya Malone, an employee of the nonprofit Special Service for Groups, or SSG, who was responsible for referring homeless people to LAHSA-funded housing. Prosecutors say Malone took roughly $180,000 in bribes from Alexander Soofer, head of the now-defunct nonprofit Abundant Blessings, and in exchange steered him "ghost" participants — so he could bill for services never rendered.

Lakiya Malone, 48, of South Los Angeles

Donye Mitchell, 55, of Orange

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Courtesy Department of Justice

)

“She was supposed to guard the money, and instead she took bribes,” Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said.

In a statement, SSG said it has been working with federal prosecutors “to ensure that any responsible individuals are held accountable” and has strengthened its “protocols and compliance.”

Charges against Soofer were announced in January. Authorities announced Wednesday that he has agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. Soofer admitted in his plea agreement to the alleged bribery scheme.

According to prosecutors, Soofer also admitted to "pocketing at least $2 million in taxpayer money for his own personal enrichment and for businesses unrelated to homeless housing," and that he has agreed to forfeit the money to the U.S. government. Prosecutors previously alleged he diverted a much larger amount: at least $10 million.

An LAist investigation found LAHSA kept awarding millions in contract renewals to Soofer’s group even after LAHSA’s own compliance team labeled it "high-risk" for, among other things, billing for services while reporting no enrolled participants.

The third defendant announced Wednesday is Donye Mitchell of the nonprofit Big Blue Umbrella. Mitchell is accused of lying about his experience to land a $1.2 million county-funded grant, receiving $315,000 and using those funds for personal expenses, including bail for a domestic violence arrest and video games. Officials said he's believed to be in Las Vegas and hadn’t been arrested as of Wednesday morning.

Mitchell is “a convicted fraudster, by the way,” Essayli said. He was convicted in 2011 of defrauding California unemployment benefits, according to the criminal complaint in the new case, and was ordered in 2012 to compensate the state $6 million.

The county funds he’s accused of stealing were awarded by a county vendor in 2024 — well after his fraud conviction.

LAist has left phone messages for Young's and Malone’s lawyers inviting their response to the charges and will update this article if they respond. It is unknown if Mitchell, who has not yet been arrested, has a lawyer.

Prosecutors' critique 

Essayli and L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman criticized what they called a glaring lack of oversight of massive spending on homeless services. Hochman cited a court-ordered 2025 report that found L.A. city officials failed to properly track $2.3 billion in homeless funds, largely by outsourcing to LAHSA — which the review found failed to collect accurate data on its vendors and hold them accountable.

"We have not seen the results you would expect for billions of dollars being spent," Hochman said.

“This is the beginning of these prosecutions,” he added.  ”Many more” are expected in the coming months, he said.

Continuing trouble for LAHSA 

The new charges were announced the day after LAHSA's governing commission decided to give up its responsibility for federal dollars, including applying for roughly $240 million a year in federal homelessness funding and running the annual homeless count.

Also on Tuesday, Mayor Karen Bass skipped a congressional hearing on LAHSA's fraud problems, calling it a "politically motivated" attack.

LAHSA, now led by Interim CEO Gita O'Neill, said in a statement Wednesday that it has "zero tolerance for fraud, waste, or the exploitation of public resources" and commended prosecutors’ action.

The agency said it terminated its contracts with Young’s nonprofit in June after evidence of wrongdoing emerged, and is pursuing recovery of cash seized from Young. The statement added that LAHSA fully cooperated with the federal task force and that no LAHSA staff are implicated — only "external provider executives and outside contractors.”

Essayli was asked Wednesday whether LAHSA's past or current leadership has been culpable.

"That's actually a very difficult question to answer," he said.

"It is not against federal law to be incompetent, unfortunately. I wish it were,” Essayli said. “So just because the people at the helm did not do a good job, that does not give us the authority to arrest them."

“ I assure you, if anyone in power engaged in violation of federal law, we will not hesitate to charge them.”