The Brief

If Democratic Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo had listened to the standard advice from campaign consultants, she wouldn’t have said much after crashing her car while driving drunk last fall.

She might have issued a written apology and then avoided speaking about her DUI, in the hopes that voters would forget about it as they decided her fate in a hotly contested race for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council.

Instead, for much of the past seven months, Carrillo hasn’t stopped talking about the crash — and her struggles with alcohol — even as she faces an uncertain future in state and local politics.

She placed fourth in the March primary and didn’t advance to the November run-off. She leaves the Legislature at the end of the year. But before she goes, she’s been using her platform and position to tell practically anyone who’ll listen about the harms of alcohol in a society that’s soaking in it.

She also introduced legislation, Assembly Bill 2865, currently pending in the California Senate, that would require high school students to get a crash course about the long- and short-term health effects and other harms of booze.

“I wish I would have known in high school what I know now,” she recently testified before the Senate Education Committee. “I would have made different choices.”

Carrillo’s troubles with booze went public in a big way at 1:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 last year, when she crashed into parked cars in Northeast Los Angeles. Police said her blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit, according to the Los Angeles Times. A local TV station obtained footage of Carrillo, swaying and slurring her words, as officers gave her a sobriety test. After spending the night in jail, Carrillo said she found TV news crews parked outside of her home.

Addicts in recovery programs often talk about a rock-bottom moment that forces them to change their lives. This was Carrillo’s.

“I had a very public fall,” she told CalMatters. “And it is only by the grace of God that I wasn’t hurt and that nobody else was hurt. But it was really an opportunity for me to look in the mirror.”

She didn’t like what she saw.

The many harms of alcohol

With the City Council primary just weeks away, in late January, Carrillo, 43, pleaded no contest to the DUI. A judge put her on probation, ordered her to attend a Mothers Against Drunk Driving class, perform 50 hours of community service and pay a $2,000 fine.

She started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and going to therapy. She said she stopped drinking — and she started reflecting.

She thought about how much alcohol saturated her life from an early age. She thought of all the adults who encouraged her to drink.

“I became angry at the guy from the liquor store across (from) my high school who sold the 14-year-old version of myself alcohol so that I could drink with my friends and party at football games and ditch school,” she told the education committee. “I got angry at the cool uncles and cousins at friends’ quinceañeras, who gave my friends and I shots of tequila when we were only 13 to 16 years of age.”

She thought about how alcohol is so ingrained in American society. Recent polling shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans drink, with little thought to the documented harms alcohol causes.

“We see it in movies and pop culture and advertisements,” she said. “And yet we are so ill informed of its consequences to our health.”

According to federal health officials, alcohol-related diseases kill 178,000 people in the U.S. each year, and death rates are increasing. Noting that alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, including bowel and breast cancers, the World Health Organization last year declared that “when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount.”

Deaths from alcohol-related diseases, meanwhile, are almost four times higher than deaths from firearms, and researchers have noted that alcohol is often a factor in gun violence.

Plus, booze was involved in nearly one-third of all fatal car crashes in the U.S, and nearly one in four suicide victims had substantial amounts of alcohol in their systems. Carrillo told the education committee that 54 Californians die each day from alcohol.

“I want young people to learn early how something that is so legally and easily accessible can do so much harm if not consumed with more knowledge and more responsibility,” she said.

Her message, as well as her emotional testimony, resonated with members of the Senate Education Committee who voted unanimously this month to advance the bill to the Senate Appropriations Committee. The bill passed the Assembly this spring without anyone voting against it.

Sen. Monique Limón, a Democrat from Santa Barbara, told Carrillo she was turning “a really difficult situation into something that’s going to benefit people.”

“It’s a reminder that what you’ve gone through, you are not alone,” Limón said. “There are many people who go through this and who don’t have the capacity to use their voice to create better, and you are doing that.”

Other Democrats with DUIs

Though her DUI may have cost Carrillo a seat on the Los Angeles City Council, two other aspiring Democratic politicians recently arrested for drinking and driving remain in their high-profile races.

State Sen. Dave Min, a Democrat from Irvine running for Congress, was arrested last year for driving drunk in Sacramento. He pleaded guilty and received a similar sentence similar to Carrillo’s. His office referred CalMatters to a campaign spokesperson who referred CalMatters to Min’s statement after his arrest in which he apologized, as well as an editorial in the Los Angeles Times that endorsed Min.

Meanwhile, Riverside City Council member Clarissa Cervantes, a Democrat who is running for an Assembly seat, was arrested last summer for driving drunk. It was her second DUI in less than 10 years, according to the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

Cervantes is seeking the seat held by her sister, Sabrina Cervantes, who is running for state Senate.

Clarissa “Cervantes is approaching a year of sobriety and supports Assemblymember Carrillo’s efforts to promote education and awareness,” Clarissa Cervantes’ campaign told CalMatters in an email. “Cervantes is grateful to be in a healthy space, moving forward strong in her race for Assembly District 58.”

The spate of DUIs among Democratic politicians prompted Republican Assemblymember Bill Essayli, a former federal prosecutor from Riverside, to introduce a resolution last year that would prohibit legislators from driving state vehicles after a DUI conviction. The measure went nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Legislature, whose leaders have endorsed Min and Cervantes over their Republican rivals in the November general election.

For her part, Carrillo said she’s not sure what her career holds after she leaves the Legislature. Before being elected to the Assembly in 2017, she was a local radio host, communications manager for the Service Employees International Union and a communications deputy for the Los Angeles City Council.

But she told CalMatters she would consider pursuing a state Senate seat if the opportunity arises.

She said she’s been bolstered by the support she’s received from her constituents who have shared with her similar stories of their own struggles with alcohol or who have seen members of their families go through what she has.

“I am choosing to normalize it, normalize talking about mental health,” Carrillo said. The main thing, though, is she wants to get people thinking – and talking – about the risks of alcohol, despite its overwhelming popularity.

“Let’s have a conversation about booze,” she said.

Los Angeles County has exotic wild animals roaming about, such as wild parrots and peacocks. But what about camels?

No, we’re not talking about that ancient camel found in the La Brea Tar Pits — these animals were brought over for a U.S. Army experiment.

How camels got into our military

We’re going back to the mid-1800s, before gas-powered automobiles changed the way we travel. The U.S. was on the brink of civil war and in the middle of westward expansion.

Typically, the army relied on mules and horses as beasts of burden, but in the new states and territories, they had a hard time hauling supplies over long distances. That was especially true for the Southwest’s dry deserts and mountains.

Meanwhile, camel brigades (also known as Camel Corps) were already in use in armies around the world. These were made up of camel drivers who ferried supplies, transported troops and conducted military cavalry operations.

Great Britain and India used the animals in the 19th century, according to London’s National Army Museum. The Imperial Camel Corps was also established during World War I, with British, Australian and New Zealand forces in the Middle East.

The Camel Corps caught on in America around the 1850s, according to the Army Historical Foundation. The idea bubbled up to Maj. Henry C. Wayne — a camel fan himself — who recommended their use to a skeptical War Department and Congress.

After some years of political finagling, they gave the experiment $30,000 in funding in 1855 (about $1 million today). The money was used to buy 74 camels from the Mediterranean and put them into military service.

The Los Angeles arrival

They were brought over on the Navy store ship USS Supply and went to Texas first, to Camp Verde. As the camels got used to their new home, the time came for one of their first test missions. The federal government planned to build a wagon road to connect the eastern U.S. to the California/Arizona border.

The Secretary of War at the time required the land surveyor to take 25 of the camels on the expedition in 1857, according to the foundation. These “ships of the desert” ended up thriving where horses and mules couldn’t.

The camels could carry a 700-pound load with ease, traveling up to 40 miles a day. They ate off the land and could go over a week without water. After the camels completed the job, the army sent them to L.A. in 1860.

This was for another test to see if camels could be used for mail delivery. They were essentially racing against mules to see who could get from Camp Fitzgerald (a short-lived Civil War camp in L.A. County) to the Colorado River fastest. What the army didn’t realize was that speed wasn’t the camels’ strong suit — several died from exhaustion.

A historic marker on the L.A. Times' old building in downtown Los Angeles on September 30, 1967. The plaque mentions that the area was used as a "corral for camels from Fort Tejon", which is one of the places the animals were sent to in California.

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Mildred L. Harris

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Los Angeles Public Library/L. Mildred Harris Slide Collection/Los Angeles Photographers Collection

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As the Civil War continued, the camels’ future became uncertain. The army was tired of the experiment and the money it cost. The camels were never officially designated as the U.S.’s “Camel Corps” and thus given no real purpose. In California, they essentially floated around L.A.-area outposts, such as the Los Angeles Quartermaster Depot in downtown, Culver City’s Camp Latham and the Drum Barracks in Wilmington.

The U.S. Army eventually sold the camels in California for about $50 each ($1,000 today) in 1864, according to the foundation. These noble animals, roped into what many called a failed military experiment, ended up as circus attractions and on ranches as pack animals. Some were even let loose.

The last of California’s “Camel Corps” is believed to be Topsy. After the experiment shut down, she was used in the Ringling Brothers Circus and movies.

Topsy was eventually sold off to what’s now the Old Zoo in Griffith Park, according to the Natural History Museum, which found her bones. She died there in 1934 at approximately 80 years old.

Tanaka Day, an epic meet-and-greet of people with the Japanese surname, is happening the weekend of Sept. 19 and 20 at — wait for it — Tanaka Farms in Irvine.

"I'm the idea guy around here," said proprietor Glenn Tanaka — aka Farmer Tanaka — who dreamed up the inaugural event. "Some of them [were] pretty good, some turned out OK."

For this one, 400 people from across the country RSVP’d, bonded by a Japanese surname that is one of the most common in the U.S. — and one that speaks to the history of Japanese immigration that first brought laborers here starting in the late 1800s.

Glenn Tanaka runs the family Tanaka Farms in Irvine.

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Courtesy Tanaka Farms

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One of them was Glenn's grandfather, Takeo Tanaka, who put down farming roots in California that span four generations and counting — Glenn's father George Tanaka, Glenn himself, and Glenn's son Kenny, whose three children are a regular presence at the farm.

"Tanaka literally means middle of the rice field," he said — farmers, essentially. And because many early immigrants were from farming villages, he added, "a lot of Tanakas came over."

The 69-year-old figured, why not bring as many of them together as possible — to hang out, tell family stories and help fill in the tapestry of the Japanese American immigration experience united by the surname.

One example is how the incarceration of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II had touched those who worked and owned farms — and ended up having to sell their holdings on the cheap.

Already, stories are flooding in. Tanaka said different siblings from one Tanaka family had sent in their experiences.

One brother read them and wound up learning new things about the family.

"What's really good to know is I've helped create families that talk," Tanaka said. "Because now they're asking, 'What did, you know, great-grandmother do?'"

A new space celebrating the art of autistic and neurodiverse youths has opened on Abbott Kinney Boulevard in Venice, amid the trendy coffee shops and boutiques.

Called “Limitless,” the space is a project of Help Group, a nonprofit that has served people in Los Angeles with autism and mental health challenges for 85 years.

“What art does is it allows people to have a voice who can’t communicate typically. It gives you an insight into who they are as a being,” Susan Berman, CEO of Help Group, told LAist.

Berman said the prime Abbott Kinney real estate was a gift from a board member. Help Group is using the square footage for a community space and gallery to feature neurodivergent artists.

Among the artists included is Noah Remis, 15, whose piece “I <3 NY” incorporates watercolor over the titles of famous musicals like Hamilton and Sweeney Todd.

“Those are different musicals that I know and love,” Remis said.

“Some I saw on Broadway. Just so you know, I also put Cats on there just to anger my dad,” he joked. He said his dream is to act on Broadway.

Noah’s dad, Rich Remis, might not be a fan of Cats, but he is a fan of seeing his son’s love of theater expressed in his painting.

“To hang it up in a gallery with everyone else’s work, it just really adds a special weight to it that I think is certainly not lost on Noah,” he said.

Noah, in response, added: “Don’t get emotional.”

Noah said he hopes other kids will be inspired by his work and maybe even take it home.

Berman, who’s been with Help Group for more than four decades, said she has big plans for the space, which opened last week.

“Our plan is for the community to see the gifts that our neurodiverse artists have, not only in their art but as human beings,” Berman said.

That ocean breeze is just not cutting it in schools in Torrance and Long Beach as Southern California reels from a heat wave.

Parents have taken to social media, created petitions and are proposing a bond measure in order to address the sweltering classrooms as temperatures hit triple digits in some areas.

Only 25% of Torrance Unified classrooms have air conditioning, according to a district spokesperson. And while 90% of Long Beach Unified schools have air conditioning, the schools without air conditioning have to bear this heat spell until the end of 2027 when new air conditioning will be in all classrooms.

What are schools doing to beat the heat?

In Long Beach, the district says there are portable fans in classrooms without AC and the district has installed heat-blocking window covers.

"The things that we do immediately and have been doing for several years, hydration stations,” Keith Butler, the deputy superintendent at TUSD, told the school board early this week. “So our nutrition services freezes blocks of ice, puts them into containers with water, and students are — and staff are able to rotate through and at least get ice water.”

There is also a classroom rotation system so everyone gets a turn in cooling zones, he said.

Can schools close on extreme heat days?

Eric Mitchell, a spokesperson for LBUSD, told LAist, “The District will not close schools because of extreme weather unless the City of Long Beach Public Health Department or a state-authorized emergency response agency directs it.”

Baillie echoed his words adding that a state-declared emergency allows schools to close temporarily without needing to make up teaching time. School funding is dependent on attendance and instructional time.

If a local emergency is declared, school districts, she said, must consult with labor unions to adjust the school schedule to either extend the school year or move to a student-free professional development day.

“Our district is actively discussing creating union-approved ‘weather days’ that would provide a mechanism to adjust the schedule,” Baillie said. “Thresholds would be part of that discussion and might focus on when national weather alerts elevate a heat advisory to an extreme heat event, as they did this week.”

So how can Torrance get ACs in the classroom?

School districts like Torrance pay for facility upgrades like new ACs through district issued bond measures. A school district takes a loan and the people in that city pay back that loan through an increase in their property taxes. That is because there is no specific state allocation of funding for major upgrades or construction. Most of the money schools get from the state is spent on instruction and other student services. There have been some occasional grant programs, like CalShape, but no ongoing source of funding.

This week, a petition to get TUSD to place a bond measure on the ballot to fund ACs has already garnered over 1500 signatures.

But, Baillie said, “Third-party polling completed earlier this year showed a willingness to vote for additional future bonds; however, when specifically asked about the costs of specific bonds to fund the $520 million needed to upgrade the electrical systems and install AC at all 34 campuses, polling showed there would not be enough support (bonds require 55% +1 of voters in an election) to pass a bond for AC.”

And so the bond measure was not placed on the upcoming ballot.

Butler, the deputy superintendent, explained during this week’s school board meeting that parents cannot simply donate an AC unit.

“ One [reason] is it's not super effective to have a typical window unit from a home that would be trying to cool a 960 sq. ft. classroom with 27 students and a teacher, maybe an instructional aide,” he said. “But the bigger issue is the ones that are large enough to really do that, the room has to have a large electrical load, and our electrical system within our buildings where most of them were built in the 1960s, it's just not meant to handle what it does.”

LAist reporter Mariana Dale contributed to this article.