In a letter dated Wednesday, April 19, to Acting City Manager City Manager Gerardo Mouet and obtained Thursday by the Register, Rojas noted he had served the city for more than 27 years. He called for the appointment of an acting police chief to “allow for a seamless transition as I separate from the department.”

The action comes amid recent criticism by some City Hall elected officials over a rise in shootings and an ongoing discussion by a sharply divided City Council of the department’s performance and leadership. The November city election, which focused in large part on crime and trends in shootings, reduced Rojas’ support on the council.

Also on Thursday, the Santa Ana Police Officers’ Association announced it was moving forward with a vote of no confidence on Rojas. The police union agreed to proceed with the vote last week, the group’s president, Gerry Serrano, wrote in an email to city officials.

Newly elected Councilman Jose Solorio, who had police union backing in the November election, said in an email to the Register Thursday that “maybe the POA won’t need to do a vote of no confidence.”

Councilman David Benavides, a Rojas ally, expressed gratitude for the chief’s service to the city, beginning as a patrol officer and ending as the city’s first Latino chief.

“I believe he was a strong and effective leader. It’s unfortunate that the police union leadership and its allies on the City Council have made the police chief’s job difficult over the last several months, and I can understand the chief’s decision to go to a place where he might be allowed to be more effective.”

In a statement, Serrano, the police union president, thanked Rojas for his service, adding: “Now we need a Chief with a new problem-solving and community-oriented policing strategy to address the spike in gang shootings and morale at the Santa Ana Police Department.”

The agency was “once recognized as a leader Nationally in Community Oriented Policing,” he said, and “with the right leadership can once again make the city of Santa Ana a safer community for the families, business stakeholders and city employees to work in.”

City police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said Rojas “is not currently discussing his employment status.”

A source close to the police department said Rojas is expected Friday, April 21, to be named police chief of BART, the Bay Area transit agency. The San Francisco Chronicle, citing multiple sources, reported Thursday that Rojas would be appointed chief of the BART force leading a department with 227 sworn officers.

Mouet said he received the resignation letter Thursday morning and was beginning meetings with personnel officials on a process for selecting an acting police chief. He said he believes there are “a lot of individuals internally” who may seek the job, but the search could be opened to external candidates, as well.

The police union email to city officials on the no-confidence vote, provided to the Register, says the union tabled plans for a no confidence vote more than a year ago, “in fairness, to allow Chief Rojas to address the issues.”

“A year has elapsed and gang shootings are up to historic numbers, mismanagement of resources and the morale at the police department has worsened to near unrecoverable levels,” Serrano wrote. “There has been no change in all of the areas of concern, and as new issues arise, the association has decided it is now time to move forward.”

The new development comes days after council members directed city staff to pursue, at the chief’s urging, what was characterized as a multi-pronged holistic approach, involving community groups, to combat shootings and gang violence.

“Gang prevention is a big challenge for us,” Rojas told the council. “With that comes the increase in shootings we’ve seen.”

“We can’t arrest ourselves out of the problem,” he added.

Mayor Pro Tem Michele Martinez, who had called for Tuesday’s discussion on gang shootings and violence, said she wishes the city could have continued efforts to reduce crime with Rojas.

“We had a good working relationship and appreciated his efforts to change the culture in the [police department] and hold his officers accountable, and his willingness to partner with the community,” Martinez wrote in a text message. “A big loss to the city family.”

There were 55 shootings in the first 50 days of 2016, a five-year high for Orange County’s second-largest city. Shortly afterward, the police department stopped releasing the number of shootings – which include attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and firing into an inhabited dwelling or vehicle – citing problems tracking from multiple databases.

Figures released by the police department last month showed shootings in May and June last year exceeded the pace of shootings in the beginning of the year, and that the trend eased before climbing back to about one-per-day in January of this year. More broadly, shootings increased 183 percent from 2013 to 2016 to 292 incidents, according to the report. Many were gang-related

The surge in shootings and the department’s handling of crime data became an issue in the council campaign later in the year, with the police union spending nearly $300,000 to help elect candidates who voiced concerns about the strategies and leadership of the department.

After the election, Rojas’ allies claimed publicly that the union wanted candidates it supported to remove both the former city manager, who agreed to depart in January, and the police chief. Serrano, the police union president, has said such decisions rest with the City Council and his association’s involvement in the campaign wasn’t unusual.

On Thursday, Benavides said that “everything that was suggested, that there were promises made, is all coming to fruition as was said, so it’s difficult to think otherwise.”

He added that it is now “very important for us as a council to provide clear direction to the acting city manager. That focus is the safety of our community, quality of life and that we don’t [fall into] allowing politics to drive decisions of the police department or city.”

In his email, Solorio noted the chief worked many years for Santa Ana “and we are thankful for his service and commitment to our city.”

Rojas was named the 20th Police Chief in May 2014. He served at the rank of corporal, sergeant, commander and deputy chief. Rojas developed the Homeland Security Division after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to the city’s website.

Rojas is a Medal of Valor recipient from the United States Customs Service, Santa Ana Police Department and the Federal Bar Association. He has a Master’s Degree in criminal justice from Chapman University and a Bachelor’s degree from California State University, Long Beach.

https://www.ocregister.com/2017/04/20/amid-controversy-over-rise-in-shootings-santa-ana-police-chief-resigns-says-he-has-new-job/

Over the next 24 hours, two more men were killed in gun violence a mile apart in a gang-plagued area already targeted for special enforcement by police and prosecutors.

The four shootings in the first five days of 2016 grew to 55 over the next 45 days, a spike in violence not seen in decades in the city that dubs itself Orange County’s downtown. As broken families held vigils for the dead and wounded, investigators pored over near-daily shooting scenes and residents peered warily from their homes, law enforcement leaders, elected officials and researchers struggled to pinpoint the cause and determine if a new era of bloodshed was dawning.

And then, according to Police Chief Carlos Rojas, the spasm of violence receded. How much isn’t completely clear because the Police Department stopped releasing shooting totals, which had helped fuel headlines in the first weeks of the year. Instead, Rojas noted that in February, major violent crimes reported to the FBI dropped 24 percent from the previous month and remained at roughly that level through the remainder of the year.

But community concern and the political repercussions of the surge of shootings became a central focus of the November City Council campaign, which highlighted public safety and reset the balance of power at City Hall.

POLICE UNION’S ROLE?

One political winner was the Santa Ana Police Officers Association, which criticized the leadership of Rojas and the city manager and spent nearly $300,000 supporting a slate of candidates that included the longtime mayor, Miguel Pulido. Three of the four candidates backed by the union, including Pulido, were elected, unseating an incumbent council member for the first time in decades.

Three weeks ago, in one of the new City Council’s first actions, a majority that included three lawmakers supported by the police union placed City Manager David Cavazos on paid administrative leave, citing performance evaluations and concerns about a City Hall personnel matter involving him. The allegations harked back to a Pulido-initiated investigation of Cavazos’ relationship with a subordinate female city employee that resulted in his censure by the International City/County Management Association.

The move against Cavazos signaled a partial reversal of the 2012 election results. In that so-called Santa Ana Spring election, voters installed a slate of candidates that promised greater City Hall transparency and responsiveness and unseated a majority allied with the mayor. That group fired the previous city manager, who was supported by Pulido, and hired Cavazos. Rojas was hired under the new administration.

In the runup to the election, officers union President Gerry Serrano attacked Rojas’ management and policing strategies, which in part emphasized assigning officers to neighborhood beats where they would get to know residents, in lieu of beefing up specialized enforcement units.

In an email to the news media and city elected officials last summer, Serrano released figures showing a more than 550 percent increase in shootings for the first half of the year compared with the same period four years earlier, when Rojas became chief.

Specifically, Serrano criticized Rojas for reassigning officers to the neighborhood beats, cutting back on resources allocated for gang suppression, and failing to reinstate a police strike force that had been used to respond to crime hot spots.

“Violent crime continues to rise at an unbelievable rate, yet patrol staffing remains below minimum staffing levels,” Serrano wrote. “What is Rojas doing to address this? Nothing. What is Cavazos doing to address this? Nothing.”

Since Rojas took over, Serrano added, officer morale is down and many are retiring early.

CRIME STATISTICS

Pulido said in an interview that the realignment of the City Council will help ensure a return to successful policing strategies.

Violent crime prevention in the city “kind of went backward,” he said. “We need to continue to make progress. Going backward and even holding our own is not acceptable.”

Responding to the police union’s portrayal of rising crime, Cavazos released a report showing Santa Ana had a 74 percent reduction in murders, aggravated assaults, forcible rapes, robberies, arsons and property crimes from 1987 to 2012, based on moving three-year averages.

Rojas cited 2016 overall crime data, reported to the FBI, which showed violent and property crimes peaked at 871 incidents in January and dipped into the 600s and 700s thereafter.

“It does appear to be slowing down a little bit,” Rojas said, “which is good.”

POLICE UNION MAILERS

In the months leading up to the election, records show the police union provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund mailers and television advertisements endorsing its slate of candidates and attacking council incumbents. The expenditures included the majority of contributions to an independent political action committee, California Homeowners Association, which spent nearly $100,000 opposing council members Roman Reyna and Vicente Sarmiento, a Register analysis found.

One of the PAC’s mailers carried a headline asking: “Want to know who to blame for Santa Ana’s rising crime? It’s Reyna and Sarmiento!” The mailer also included a reproduction of a Register article on Cavazos, the city manager, which noted that he received a bonus amid allegations of misconduct and highlighted a reference to “a romantic relationship with a subordinate city employee.”

The police officers association’s independent spending far exceeded that by a police union-endorsed candidate, Orange County sheriff’s officer Juan Villegas, who unseated Reyna.

Council supporters of the police chief and Cavazos, who clashed with Pulido over various City Hall projects, see the election results not as referendum on the city’s public safety programs but as a power grab by the police union, which among other things is seeking raises for members and more officer hiring for patrol shifts.

Reyna, who grew up in a gang-infested community near El Salvador Park, said at a recent council meeting that the spike in shootings early in 2016 appeared to be tied to a struggle involving the role of a top gang leader and not deficient city policing tactics.

“The other gang members all wanted to sit in that leadership position so they fought literally with guns to see who could get that position,” Reyna said.

DIFFERING VIEWS

At the first meeting of the new City Council last month, Councilman Sal Tinajero, Cavazos’ most vocal supporter, complained about what he portrayed as political strong-arm tactics by the police union. He alleged that Serrano, the group’s president, “met with different folks, saying: ‘If you fire the chief of police, we will support you. The only way to get to the chief of police is to fire the city manager. We are going to raise over $400,000 and those who support this, we will support, and those who don’t, we are going to run someone against you,’”

“He asked me … ‘So Sal, are we going to throw a body out the window?’” Tinajero continued. “This (police union) is who’s just taken over our city.”

Tinajero also defended Rojas’ leadership, saying: “You see for the first time in our city, officers are being held accountable. … We need to help our community be safe and being safe means that we need community policing. We need a relationship with our police officers.”

Serrano said evaluating the city manager is the job of the City Council, not the police union.

“It’s not our issue,” he said. “Why Councilman Tinajero wants to include me in it, I have no idea.”

And his union’s involvement in this Santa Ana election was “nothing out of the ordinary,” Serrano said.

“All unions invest when it comes to election – that’s what we do, we look out and try to support elected officials that are supportive of labor unions,” he said. “I look forward to working with our entire City Council and being part of moving the city forward.”

CHANGES COMING?

Pulido said he expects that the new City Council will revive a gang suppression unit.

“Part of it is we have to go back to basics. … We need to work closely with the community and do many of the things we’ve done in the past,” Pulido said. “We know what works, and it’ll work again.”

Similarly, Jose Solorio, another police union-endorsed candidate elected in November, said bringing down gang violence and shootings will require restoring gang unit officers and more transparency of crime statistics.

“It’s time for the city to step up and do something about it,” Solorio said. “I think with the addition of myself and council member Juan Villegas, we both have very strong pro-public safety backgrounds.”

Councilwoman Michele Martinez was the swing vote, siding with Pulido and his two newly elected allies to place Cavazos on leave. The councilwoman supported Cavazos’ hiring, but her opinion shifted after he alleged Martinez sexually harassed and made romantic advances toward him. A city-ordered external investigation found that his allegation was without merit.

Martinez said she’s not aligned with either City Council camp and doesn’t vote based on their agendas.

“I’m very independent. I think in both sides, it’s all political and the city manager is right in the middle,” she said. “I will be working with anyone who is willing to set good policy.”

Pulido has said talk of an alliance between him and the police union is irrelevant, and the election results are what counts.

“Do people who work harder sometimes gain more votes? Yes,” Pulido said.

FIRE THE CITY MANAGER?

While the shooting-per-day average from the beginning of 2016 hasn’t been the case for the first weeks of this year, last Saturday night was the most violent in recent memory, with six people shot, according to Santa Ana police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna.

On the political front, it appears the reverberations of the November election are just beginning. Cavazos supporters say they are committed to checking the political power of the mayor and police officers association at City Hall.

“We have a strong, solid team in the council” that among other things supports the current police chief, Councilman David Benavides said.

Five votes are needed to fire a city manager, who has the authority to appoint and remove the police chief.

The sharply divided council is expected to revisit Cavazos’ employment in closed session before today’s council meeting.

https://www.ocregister.com/2017/01/18/how-a-violent-month-in-santa-ana-set-the-stage-for-council-infighting-election-angst-and-jobs-possibly-lost/

Together nearly six years, the couple had been talking marriage – Trinh had even been saving to buy an engagement ring – but the kind and generous Nguyen was already like part of the family, said Trinh’s brother Haian Trinh, 33.

She was Haisan Trinh’s “first girlfriend, ever,” his brother said Friday as her boyfriend and parents prayed, “and in so many ways was the perfect girl for him.”

Nguyen, 31, who moved to Santa Ana from Vietnam as a child, was one of 14 people killed Wednesday in the mass shooting in San Bernardino. Her friends and family remember her as “an incredible person with a contagious smile” who “had a heart bigger than the sun,” according to a GoFundMe site to help her mother, Van Nguyen, with the memorial costs.

Like the other shooting victims, Tin Nguyen was at a holiday luncheon for the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, where she worked as a food inspector.

Nguyen long had an interest in health issues, earning her bachelor’s degree in health science in 2010 from Cal State Fullerton.

While studying there, she became the first intern with the Office of Environmental Health and Safety to take and pass a Registered Environmental Health Specialist certification exam, according to Colleen Wilkins, a Cal State Fullerton occupational safety officer.

“She was enthusiastic about life and opportunities before her, and she was dependable and down-to-earth,” Danny H. Kim, associate professor of health science, said in a statement.

That October after Nguyen graduated, Kim received an email from her informing him of her new job with the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health.

Outside of work, her day always started and ended with her boyfriend, his brother said.

Every morning, Nguyen would call Haisan Trinh to wake him up for work and he would call her on his way back home from work, Haian Trinh said.

The two had talked about buying a house somewhere in Orange County together and “she wanted five girls or something,” Haian Trinh said. Nguyen had tried on a wedding dress, and Haisan Trinh was saving up for an engagement ring.

“He had all the intention of doing it,” Haian Trinh said about his brother’s plans to tie the knot. “He just thought he had a little bit more time.”

The pair met at Valley High in Santa Ana, and after going separate ways for college they reconnected. In the nearly six years that they dated, “he has never been mad at her once,” the brother said.

Getting mad at Nguyen seemed almost an impossibility, those who knew her at different points of her life said.

At McFadden Intermediate, Nguyen was soft-spoken – perhaps because of her limited English – but her classmate Phi Luong, 31, recalls being drawn to her because “she was just a very nice person.”

“She just had that personality, you know, that goodness about her,” Luong, of Costa Mesa, said.

The two girls went on to play tennis together at Valley High. Luong, the team captain at the time, said Nguyen was “willing to do anything for everybody.”

“This just literally breaks my heart,” Luong said of the shooting. “Because kids in Santa Ana, people don’t expect a lot from the inner city communities, but I felt that she had a lot to give.”

She was a giving daughter and sister as well.

From working through Adams Elementary, Carr Intermediate, McFadden Intermediate and Valley High School learning English as a second language, Nguyen came to be the sole provider for her mother and older brother at their home in Santa Ana, which she owned.

“She provided everything financially and emotionally,” Haian Trinh said.

One giving memory of Nguyen sticks out in the mind of her seventh-grade science teacher, Erin Sloan, at Carr Intermediate.

As part of the gardening curriculum, Sloan had ordered 20 pounds of worms for his students to learn about feeding them garbage to create compost. The worms were expected to arrive in two weeks, but instead arrived in two days – at the end of the school day Friday.

That worried Sloan, because the worms would die if they weren’t transferred from the packaging to plastic bins with wet newspaper shreds. Nguyen volunteered.

“I thought, ‘that’s incredibly nice,’” Sloan, 57, recounted. “But that was just the way she was.”

On Thursday, when Sloan heard the names of the 14 San Bernardino victims, he realized one was Nguyen – the girl who had sweetly volunteered to transfer worms on a Friday afternoon.

“Another light in the world is out,” Sloan said.

When her boyfriend, Haisan Trinh, a mechanical engineer for Boeing, got wind of the mass shooting Wednesday, he texted her, his brother said. No response.

He “went to every single hospital in the San Bernardino area trying to find her,” Trinh’s brother said. Eventually, Trinh sent another text – to his brother, informing him that Nguyen had died in the carnage.

“I know that she had a surprise for him,” Haian Trinh. “And now, he will never know.”

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/nguyen-694940-trinh-brother.html

“His work was his life,” she said. “That’s what he stood for. He wanted peace.”

On Oct. 11, 1985, the morning after he appeared on local and national television praising Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat as “a man of peace,” Alex Odeh went to his office. As he unlocked and opened the door, a pipe bomb detonated, blowing off his legs.

“The ceiling has dropped. All the windows on the second floor are blown out. There is glass clear across the street. It looked like a tornado hit it,” Greg Lee, an attorney who witnessed the explosion from a building nearby, said in an Orange County Register article published the next day.

Alex Odeh died in surgery 2 1/2 hours after the blast at the age of 41.

Three decades later, one of Orange County’s earliest acts of terrorism remains unsolved. A reward of up to $1 million the FBI announced in 1996 for information leading to any arrests or convictions remains, and Odeh’s family and Anti-Discrimination Committee members are using the anniversary this year to fuel a national movement seeking answers.

“I believe it is the oldest open counter-terrorism investigation we have,” said David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office overseeing seven counties. “I’m not aware of anything on this scale that has occurred in Orange County since.”

Helena Odeh was 7 years old when her father died; her sisters, Samya and Susan, were 5 and 1, respectively. Sunday, the 30th anniversary of Alex Odeh’s assassination, his widow, Norma, and Samya will visit his grave – but Helena Odeh will stay home.

“I haven’t gone in years, just because it’s too painful for me,” Helena Odeh, 37, said. “I am the only one of my sisters who remembers my father. His touch, his voice – I’m the only one who remembers that, and when I see his face on the gravestone, it just kills me. It tears me up inside.”

Most of the family still lives in Orange County but didn’t want their city of residence published because of safety concerns.

Alex Odeh was born in the Palestinian village of Jifna and studied engineering at Cairo University in Egypt, but was unable to return home after the Six-Day War. The experience prompted him to pursue a political science degree instead.

He moved to the U.S. in 1972, and when he returned to Jifna three years later, he met and married Norma. They settled in Orange, and he served as a part-time professor of Middle East history and Arabic at Cal State Fullerton and Coastline Community College, while making peaceful relations in the Middle East his life goal.

That goal remains elusive today, and so too does closure in the Odeh case.

Thirty years with no information from the FBI except, “It’s an ongoing investigation,” is a long time for the Odeh family and the Arab-American community, said Lana Kreidie, president of the committee’s Orange County chapter and a criminal defense attorney.

Investigators within a few years of the attack named three Jewish Defense League members as persons of interest, “and then you have crickets,” she said. One of those men, Robert Manning, was later sentenced to prison for the 1980 bombing of a computer company in Manhattan Beach.

“We want transparency from the FBI, we want to know what they’ve done to follow up on these leads,” said Kreidie, who encouraged Helena Odeh to join the local chapter’s board. “We’re not getting any closure.”

Abed Ayoub, legal and policy director for the committee’s national office in Washington, D.C., added: “Sadly, many feel that the life of a Palestinian American is not as valuable as another life. That’s the perception that’s being given, that an Arab life is not worth investigating and not worth taking action on.”

But Bowdich said the FBI has not backed off on its efforts.

“Absolutely it’s a cold case – it’s 30 years old – but that doesn’t mean it’s sitting on a shelf somewhere in a box,” he said on Friday. “As an organization we are very committed to hopefully bringing this case to a solution, apprehending those individuals that were involved.”

Bowdich acknowledged that a working theory is a Jewish extremist group targeted Alex Odeh and “we’re continuing down that path; we’re just looking for that critical link to solve the case.”

In 1997, vandals splattered red paint on a statue honoring Odeh outside of Santa Ana Public Library. That case, considered a hate crime, remains unsolved, too.

The FBI continues to reexamine evidence on the explosion and is looking at “new techniques” to determine if any more evidence can be generated to solve the case, Bowdich said.

“And the reward is out there,” he said. “That has not been rescinded at all.”

Meanwhile, ADC committee members continue pushing for justice for Alex Odeh with new efforts.

Out of Washington, D.C., the national committee and a diverse group of 25 civil and human rights organizations including the NAACP on Friday sent letters urging the U.S. Department of Justice and Congress to rededicate resources to the investigation. On the anniversary Sunday at 9 a.m. they are fronting a #Justice4AlexOdeh Twitter storm.

The committee’s Orange County chapter is holding its annual memorial banquet, themed “Promoting Peace, Defeating Terrorism” this year, on Saturday at the Sheraton Park Hotel at the Anaheim Resort. Guests will participate in a letter-writing drive to defense leaders.

Knowing the FBI continues to pursue her father’s case is important to Helena Odeh.

“It’s been 30 years, and if I have to wait another 30 years to get a little answer, that’s fine,” she said. “I just want some kind of answer. I just want to know why, what was the reason?”

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/odeh-686976-years-alex.html

The 20-year veteran of the Police Department, off-duty and possibly driving while intoxicated, sideswiped a wall near East Josephine Street around 5:30 a.m., McManus said. The sergeant then walked several blocks to a building, where a security guard called police.

“A number of improprieties” were discovered involving a lieutenant, three other sergeants and two officers who responded to the scene, McManus said.

There was an “attempt to take the sergeant home and to remove what could be evidence from his vehicle,” McManus said.

The incident came to the Police Department’s attention through an officer who was present but did not take part and is not being investigated.

The sergeant who crashed the car had worked the night before, and some of his officers responded to the crash, McManus said. Results of blood and urine alcohol-level tests administered later that day were not released.

McManus declined to name the seven involved but said they are not facing charges at this time, pending ongoing criminal and administrative investigations.

“It is in the midstages, and we are moving aggressively forward on both,” he said.

The sergeant has been put on administrative leave, and the six others are on administrative duty.

The car had minor damage. But McManus, known to take a hard stand against DWI, said he is not taking the incident lightly.

“My concern is for the integrity and reputation of the Police Department,” he said.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Officers-accused-of-crash-cover-up-3085551.php