Here’s the latest episode in the continuing story of the unholy obsession of psychopathic rageball George Yu, commander in chief of the Krazy Kriminal Konspiracy known as the Chinatown Business Improvement District, Los Angeles neighborhood prosecutor Tia Strozier, and LAPD senior lead officer Elizabeth Ortega, with the very existence of Chinatown resident Theo Henderson. You can read a report on this through May 2019 here.
The short version is that at Yu’s behest, Strozier and Ortega, with the cooperation of other City officials from CD1 and Rec and Parks have been trying unsuccessfully for months to arrest Henderson or at least find a way to ban him from Alpine Recreation Center. They have subjected him to police hyperscrutiny in the hope of finding actionable violations and aggressively try to impose “services” on him as a way to forcibly relocate him. Today’s post will bring the story up through July.1
One of the favored tactics George Yu and his minions at the City of Los Angeles2 use against the homeless people they’re targeting is involuntary mental health commitments. So it’s no surprise to see Ortega reassuring Yu via email on June 3, 2019 that she’s arranged for the County Department of Mental Health to “speak to Theo” What’s slightly surprising, though, is to see the putatively professional Ortega telling ostensibly private citizen Yu what seems like private medical information about Henderson. This ethical lapse certainly highlights the fact that the point of the intervention Ortega has arranged has little to do with Henderson’s well-being and lots to do with Yu’s vendetta.
Not that it needs to be highlighted. The fact that anyone with any training whatsoever, or even with any common sense, could sincerely think that Theo Henderson has any mental health problems at all, is completely implausible. It’s ridiculous. There is no legitimate reason for any competent person to call DMH about Henderson, who is among the sanest people I know. If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him, and want to judge for yourself3 you can watch him speaking some truth to Yu at a recent BID meeting.
On June 27, 2019 Henderson and other homeless rights activists held a press conference at City Hall to promote the Services Not Sweeps Coalition, which stoked Yu’s always-smoldering rage at Henderson into an unhinged thermonuclear frenzy. On June 28 Yu sent an email to Ortega and Strozier, the subject line of which read “Theo’s Press Conference”, accusing Henderson of being a pedophile based on the exceedingly thin evidence of some pictures Henderson had taken of children at Alpine Rec Center and posted on Instagram.
Yu’s obviously self-interested accusations evoked a bizarre ranting response from Ortega, who bemoaned not just the fact that taking pictures in a public park is not illegal, but what she referred to as the “unfortunate” fact that LAPD can’t arrest people for being in public unless they actually commit a crime. Reading Ortega’s response ought to be, if you have any doubt whatsoever, enough to convince anyone that Henderson didn’t do anything illegal at all, let alone whatever George Yu has cooked up in his seething reptilian id, or Ortega wouldn’t have been so unhappy that it’s not really possible to arrest people until they do something illegal:
From: Elizabeth Ortega <36899@lapd.online>
Date: Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 1117 AM
To: George Yu <geoyu28@aol.com>, “Tia S. Strozier” <tia.strozier@lacity.org>
Good Morning,
Thank you for the information. LAHSA will be out there to speak to him next week and offer him services. I have Patrol Officers respond to Alpine Rec Center after 2230 hours to warn and cite him for sleeping in the park. However, when the Officers arrive, Theo is not there. Unfortunately, unless he commits a crime he is allowed to be at the park during park hours, which is a public place. In a public place there is no expectation of privacy from photos and/or filming. We will continue to respond during the evening hours to attempt to warn and cite him.
Take Care, Senior Lead Officer Elizabeth Ortega
This conversation is also interesting and important because it shows that George Yu stalks homeless rights advocates on Facebook. It’s fairly reprehensible that the City of Los Angeles pays tax money to freaks like George Yu to support this creepy Internet behavior. It’s not an isolated instance, by the way. The Highland Park BID also spends City money on paid Facebook stalkers. Although, I suppose, in a City where municipal employees, such as Council staffer Bill Cody, expend City resources on stalking political opponents and using the information gathered to deny them access to public resources, this is not surprising.
Amazingly, it looks like George Yu’s hamhanded attempt to destroy Theo Henderson with his unfounded accusations of pedophilia got zero traction. Which I guess isn’t surprising. If you can’t even convince a cop, and not just any cop but a copy who’s already spent all of 2019 helping you subvert Henderson’s civil rights, that he’s guilty, why would sane people believe you?
But Tia Strozier, evidently not one who’s in any kind of hurry to discard evidence, no matter how deeply contradicted by facts and sanity it might appear to be, was not ready to just give up on this pedophile theory. Sure, she and George Yu couldn’t convince an LAPD officer, but maybe, thought Strozier to herself, maybe it will be possible to convince top Garcetti staffer Jamie Keene, to whom she sent this email on July 23, 2019.
The hope, it seems, is that Keene would call in the Unified Homeless Response Center, which would then proceed to point their inimitable brand of weaponized outreach at the guy. And, for that extra twist of cruelty and misuse of public power, Strozier makes it clear that it’s urgent to outreach Henderson right out of the damn park because Gil Cedillo wants to have an event there. Here’s what she had to say for herself:
From: Tia Strozier <tia.strozier@lacity.org>
Date: Tue , Jul 23, 2019 at 4:17 PM
To: Jamie Keene <jamie.keene@lacity.org>
Cc: Isabella Bolton Torres <isabella.bolton.torres@lacity.org>, Ricardo Flores <Ricardo.X.FIores@lacity.org>
Hi Jamie,
There is a man experiencing homelessness in Alpine Recreation Center park that may benefit from UHRC outreach services. He stays in the park all day playing with children (in permitted and “informally reported” unpermitted ways) and may be sleeping in the park at night. Is there any way your team can make contact with him? Fyi he has become angry very quickly when other providers have tried to reach out. I’ve included his identifying info below.
It is especially time sensitive because of a proposed resource fair hosted by Council District 1 in the first week of August Field rep Ricardo Flores (included) is the contact for this event. My unit is not participating in the resource fair.
Thank you for your help with this!
Physical description : Black man, heavy set.
Name : Theo Henderson
Age: Approximately 50 yrs old
Sincerely,
Tia Strozier
And the very the fact that Strozier would bring up Cedillo’s event shows her remarkable ham-handedness and out-of-touch-itude. This email asking Keene to relocate Henderson for the sake of the event having been sent more than six weeks after the Los Angeles Times called out Eric Garcetti for having a homeless encampment swept in advance of a speaking engagement,4 evoking an embarrassed and implausible denial from Alex Comisar.
There’s no way on earth after that article that Garcetti’s staff is ever going to relocate Theo Henderson to make room for an event. Or at least not as a result of a public conversation. And evidently Keene didn’t find Strozier’s accusation plausible in the least. She was all like if it’s that bad you need to call the cops immediately, which I read as a diplomatic way of telling Strozier that she’s obviously full of shit:
From: Jamie Keene <jamie.keene@lacity.org>
Date: Tue Jul 23, 2019 at 5:19 PM
To: Tia Strozier <tia.strozier@lacity.org>
Cc: Isabella Bolton Torres <isabella.bolton.torres@lacity.org>, Ricardo Flores <Ricardo.X.FIores@lacity.org>, Brian Buchner <brian.buchner@lacity.org>
Hi Tia,
Can you clarify what you mean in writing that he plays with children in “informally reported unpermitted ways”? That sounds like a very serious allegation that merits an immediate law enforcement response is needed. Please give me a call if you have more details on this.
Thanks,
Jamie
So that’s where we are in this story. As of less than a month ago George Yu was still attacking Theo Henderson by pouring his hostile lies into the willing ears of Tia Strozier and Elizabeth Ortega, who were floundering around desperately trying to please the psychopath by somehow, any old how, bringing him the head of Theo Henderson.
And if you think I am exaggerating, consider the fact that whenever the police are called on a black man in Los Angeles the odds that he will die go up immeasurably. Overall one in one thousand black men die at the hands of police. Clearly if the universe is limited to black men on whom someone called the police the ratio will be much, much higher than that.
Add to that the fact that Strozier is essentially setting Henderson up to be killed by telling, as she does Keene, first responders that “he has become angry very quickly” when previously contacted. First, this is a disingenous lie,5 and second, the most likely effect is to put police on edge and therefore make them more likely to kill him.
So essentially Strozier isn’t just trying to relocate Henderson at Yu’s behest, she’s also trying to organize a state-sponsored execution. And her salary is paid out of public money to provide this service to George Yu.6 I guess I’ve become inured to the sad fact that at the mere whim of zillionaires our City officials will bend, twist, and subvert pretty much every aspect of the law as it relates to what they’re pleased to call “quality of life.” It just hadn’t occurred to me that they’d go so far as to kill.7 But it seems that they will.
Image of SLO Elizabeth Ortega is ©2019 MichaelKohlhaas.org and there’s some damn Twitpix or t’other ‘swell.
- By the way, the emails that this post are based on come from a large set just released by the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office, and you can read through the entire spool here if you’re interested.
- I’m being somewhat rhetorical when I call Strozier and Ortega Yu’s minions. Actually Yu is equally the City’s minion in that the City funds his BID with tax money and in exchange he helps them create the illusion of community support for whatever random crap they want to do and his security operates in the interests of the City but outside of the legal constraints that City officials are subject to. But again, by letting Yu exercise the power he’s able to harness the City is signalling to the zillionaires who are the masters of both Yu and the City that their interests are being aggressively served. It’s pretty hard, actually, to sort out who is whose minion in such matters. Basically it’s minions and masters all the way down with the roles incredibly fluid. It may be that a completely different analytic framework is needed to understand this sociology. But I don’t feel like I have to solve that problem before I call people minions, which I will happily continue to do without worrying about the deeper semantics.
- And maybe want to get some idea of why George Yu is so angry at him.
- This fact based on emails obtained by me and originally published here, thanks!
- I’m not claiming here that Henderson hasn’t become angry. I just don’t know. But I can say that if he has become angry it pretty much guaranteed to be because of the constant violations of his civil rights organized by George Yu and carried out by willing executioners like Tia Strozier than it is to be some intrinisic propensity for anger on Henderson’s part.
- Which is not OK. I’ll leave you with that, but probably I’ll follow up later on this aspect of the story.
- Killing by raising the probability that your victim will die is as much killing as any other kind of reckless endangerment.
