How did a man facing sexual assault charges get hired as an LA Metro ambassador?

A Los Angeles Metro contractor hired a man with an open sexual assault case against him to be a transit ambassador, the green-polo wearing personnel that the countywide transportation agency brands as a friendly presence on its trains and buses.

The ambassador, Fernando Vinicio Chavez, met his next alleged victim while working on Metro’s system, according to police.

In August 2023, four months after he was hired, Santa Monica police arrested Chavez for assault to commit rape, according to a public information bulletin the department published.

“Chavez met the victim while working in Downtown Los Angeles and the victim agreed to meet after Chavez ended his shift,” according to the bulletin. The bulletin said the two went to the beach in Santa Monica.

He was arrested while wearing a green Metro-branded polo, a spokesperson for the Santa Monica Police Department said.

Metro’s ambassador program, which is managed by two third-party vendors, was established to place easily identifiable helping hands on the system that riders could rely on. The answer to how a potentially dangerous person was hired to help carry out this duty comes down to an imperfect backgrounding process.

An executive at Strive Well-Being, the vendor that hired Chavez, said the check the San Diego-based wellness company ran on him did not surface his pending sexual assault charges or anything else of concern. The company, which has a $30 million contract with Metro, has since adopted a “more comprehensive” background check, the executive said.

Metro will continue to rely on its vendors to facilitate the program until the ambassadors are brought into the agency’s in-house public safety department, which is in its early stages.

Details on the case

In June 2022, the Orange Police Department arrested Chavez. He was charged with forced sexual penetration by a foreign object and assault with intent to commit a sexual offense originating from an incident in October 2021.

Chavez was working as a ride-share driver at the time, and the victim was his passenger, a spokesperson for the Orange Police Department said.

Chavez posted bail for $100,000 in August through a bail bonds company after he was charged and originally pleaded not guilty to both counts. The office of the Orange County public defender did not respond to a request for comment from Chavez or the attorney who represented him.

Strive Well-Being hired Chavez in April 2023 to work as a transit ambassador while he was on bail awaiting trial.

Sanjay Sangani, the president of Strive Well-Being, said his company conducted a pre-employment criminal background check that searched for felony and misdemeanor records over a seven-year period.

Sangani and Metro cited the state’s Fair Chance Act as the reason Chavez’s legal history slipped through the cracks.

The law, which went into effect in 2018, prohibits most employers from asking about conviction history before making a job offer or considering arrests that don’t result in convictions in their decision to hire someone.

The law, however, does not prevent an employer from asking about “an arrest for which the employee or applicant is out on bail,” according to state labor code. 

When asked about this exemption, Sangani said Strive Well-Being would consider pending charges in its hiring decision.

“However, [the] Ambassador has to disclose that voluntarily to us or it must show up in the pre-employment background check report we receive,” Sangani said.

LAist has reached out to the company that Strive Well-Being used to conduct its background check and will update this article if it hears back.

A judge in Orange County placed Chavez back in custody in August 2023 after the Santa Monica arrest. Sangani told LAist Chavez was fired three days after his arrest.

In May 2024, Chavez pleaded guilty to assault with intent to commit a sexual offense in Orange County. The other charge from that case was dropped.

A judge sentenced him to four years in state prison. He was admitted to the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security prison in Riverside County sometimes called “Norco,” in June 2024, according to the state’s inmate search portal.

The L.A. County District Attorney’s Office declined to pursue charges from the alleged Santa Monica assault. When asked why a case wasn’t filed, the office referred LAist to its public records request process.

Through that process, LAist obtained a charge evaluation worksheet in which the District Attorney’s Office said there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue a case.

“Victim alleged that Suspect attempted to sexually assault her on the beach,” the charge evaluation worksheet stated. “Suspect said that he was ‘just chilling’ with Victim and never made a move on her. Due to lack of corroboration the case is declined for insufficient evidence.”

How did Metro and Strive handle the case?

Metro said that in the days following the 2023 arrest, it investigated the case with Strive Well-Being and worked with both contractors to “tighten background checks going forward.”

The augmented background still covers a span of seven years. It considers a total of 10 counties of residence of potential hires, up from the five county search that Chavez was subject to, and looks for applicant names on “multi-state” sex offender registries, Sangani of Strive Well-Being said. Originally, the background check considered only the national and California state sex offender registries.

Metro said it requested Strive Well-Being re-run the wider-reaching background check on Chavez and other ambassadors.

The charges against Chavez in Orange County didn’t show up on the more comprehensive background check, Sangani told LAist.

In October 2023, just two months after Chavez was arrested in Santa Monica, Metro recommended that the program be moved under the agency’s control. The move was pitched as a way to improve retention, efficiency and “uniformity in … pre-employment background checks,” according to the presentation staff presented to the Metro Board Operations, Safety and Customer Experience committee.

Metro said the decision to move the program in house wasn’t motivated by Chavez’s case. Instead, Metro said the move would offer ambassadors the job security that comes with union representation, a rich benefit package and a career path.

The ambassador program

Following the nationwide reckoning with police brutality and the murder of George Floyd, Metro, along with security and police forces across the country, reevaluated its approach to public safety.

A Metro Ambassador helps a person at Union Station in Los Angeles on this April.

(

Samanta Helou Hernandez

/

LAist

)

In 2022, Metro entered into agreements with two companies to “develop, operate, and manage a cohesive unit of qualified and effective public-facing personnel,” according to a presentation agency staff delivered to board members.

The Metro Board agreed to pay security firm RMI International more than $55 million to oversee 244 personnel and Strive Well-Being nearly $16 million for its 55 personnel.

In 2024, the Metro Board voted to increase Strive Well-Being’s contract since the original agreement to continue its services and account for additional ambassadors that were added under the wellness company’s purview. Strive Well-Being’s contract with Metro now totals more than $30 million.

Metro officially launched its transit ambassador program in March 2023. The agency now deploys 220 people on an average day across the system to help with wayfinding, direct riders to helpful resources and report wrongdoing.

Ambassadors engaged with Metro riders nearly 70,000 times per month on average last year. They also administered naloxone, the opioid-overdose reversing drug, around 11 times per month, according to an LAist analysis of Metro data.

According to a 2023 customer survey, more than 60% of respondents who had seen ambassadors on the system said that they help them feel safe.

The agency announced in May that outgoing San Francisco police chief Bill Scott will lead the new public safety department, which will bring the ambassadors together with law enforcement officers, security that enforces the system code of conduct and social service-oriented teams, like homeless outreach and crisis intervention specialists.

Metro cited lack of central accountability as one of the reasons for the new public safety department.

As part of its vision for a multilayered public safety department, Metro wants to increase the average daily deployment of ambassadors by 60%.

That means that once the new public safety department is fully stood up later this decade, there will be more than 360 ambassadors patrolling Metro trains and buses per day.

Metro said that once the ambassadors are brought in-house, they’ll be subject to the agency’s “stringent background checks.”

“Metro is authorized by the Department of Justice to access state and local criminal history records as well as subsequent arrest notifications for all personnel,” the agency said.