By Mark Gutglueck
Allegations have surfaced in three civil filings that are progressing toward trial that the senior command within the sheriff’s department has become a den of both lesser qualified, in some cases dishonest and in others criminally negligent officers who have promoted on the basis of their loyalty to Sheriff Shannon Dicus rather than innate competence or acquired skill levels.
As significantly, it is alleged, Dicus and other high-ranking members of the department have actively networked to prevent members of the department or its augmentation teams who have direct knowledge about the improprieties or malfeasance of his professional associates from advancing up the chain of command or to remove them from the department altogether.
Of note is that this latest round of criticism aimed at Dicus and the sheriff’s department originates not with individuals who have been arrested by the department but rather with a sergeant, two lieutenants and a former federal judge who was a longtime volunteer with its search and rescue division.
Shannon Dicus is the current and sixth of Frank Bland’s successors as San Bernardino County sheriff and the political machine Bland created.
To become sheriff in 1954, Bland, who was then the police chief of Needles, had to wage a dynamic political battle to unseat his predecessor, Eugene Mueller, who had been sheriff for a single four-year term. Mueller, likewise, in 1950 had ousted the previous sheriff, Jim Stocker, who had been in office a mere four years after defeating Emmet Shay in 1946. Despite having climbed to the top of the law enforcement heap in San Bernardino County by virtue of willingly entering the political fray and getting elected, Bland thought of himself as a lawman first, and in forming his conception of himself being a politician came in a very distant second place. Upholding the law, Bland felt, and having to head out on the hustings to beg voters for votes for himself was a duty that he considered to be below the dignity of the office of sheriff. Accordingly, with the dawn of 1955 and the start of his maiden term as sheriff, he immediately embarked on the first three of his four primary goals, consisting of living up to his campaign commitments of interrupting the county’s flourishing vice activity by shutting down brothels, gambling houses and pinball parlors where teenagers were spending, by his estimation, too much time instead of doing their homework. He took a more gradual approach with his fourth key goal, which entailed constructing around him, using not only members of the department but those who were the driving forces and power brokers in the various communities around the far flung 20,105-square mile county. Already Needles’ favorite son, he befriended business leaders, agricultural interests and elected officials in the cities of San Bernardino, Redlands, Ontario, Upland, Colton, Barstow, Rialto, Chino, Montclair and Fontana as well as the communities of Victorville, Lake Arrowhead, Alta Loma, Cucamonga, San Antonio Heights, Big Bear and Apple Valley. He convinced the movers and shakers in all those places that he represented both the stability and sensible order they needed to succeed, inducing them to close ranks, one and all, behind him. They pledged, when the time came, to assist in defraying the expense of any campaign he needed to wage to remain as their sheriff. This served in warding off any others who contemplated running against him in 1958. He was then at liberty to disburse from his political war chest, as much of the money that was left over to any other elected officeholders or hopefuls around the county he deemed worthy of holding office. This served to both broaden and deepen his support network. Again and again, as in 1958, no opponents against him emerged in 1962, 1966, 1970 and 1974. That lack of challenge and unbroken control of the sheriff’s office bred both excess and a degree of corruption including accusations that Bland had become enmeshed in the protection of the region’s prostitution trade and diversions of money entrusted to the department for vice and narcotics operations to his own personal use, which led, in 1978, to three candidates challenging him. For the first time, the Bland political machine was put to the test, at which point its true strength was demonstrated. The campaign celebrating Bland as the quintessential lawman dedicated to forthrightly collaring criminals and serving justice overwhelmed press revelations about his reversal from his reformist approach in 1954 to an authority who had become associated with at least some of those he was supposed to be apprehending and the claims of his opponents that he was no longer a righteous upholder of the law. Bland was elected to his seventh four-year term as sheriff, easily outdistancing the other three candidates with 99,820 votes to their combined 84,391.
In 1982, further scandal, such as revelations about impounded vehicles and stolen items recovered by the department being diverted into the possession of department members or ones relating to the use of the red card file to angle for control over politicians and judges, was about to break into the open. One of Bland’s own people, Charles Callahan, a captain with the department, sensed blood in the water and declared his candidacy. The then-69-year-old and increasingly alcoholic Bland opted to retire, looking first to pass the torch to Floyd Jones, a one-time California Highway Patrol commander who had jumped mid-career to the sheriff’s department to accede to the second-in-command position of undersheriff. Jones, however, had a heart condition that made making him sheriff inadvisable. Bland was determined to keep the department, its reputation and its hundreds of thousands of files that included reports of calls for service, notational references to what and whom his deputies had encountered in the field, incident reports raw investigative data notes and/or transcriptions of interviews and interrogations of victims, witnesses, subjects and suspects, as well as investigation reports, documentation and assessments of evidence, physical and otherwise, nder the control of someone who would held him and all he had done during his illustrious law enforcement career in high regard and would respect his legacy. Bland’s second choice for his successor was another member of the department’s command echelon, Floyd Tidwell, who had been with the department since the 1950s and in the 1960s had served as the department’s inspector. Tidwell’s work as inspector, in which post he was provided with multiple intimate glimpses of local governmental operations at various spots around the county, was followed by stints as  a sheriff’s captain in multiple postings around the county and later as a deputy chief  and finally as the assistant sheriff working out of the sheriff’s headquarters in downtown San Bernardino. In the last two positions, he oversaw the detectives in the intelligence division and attached to the sheriff’s command. Tidwell, Bland knew, understood not just how the department functioned but possessed a gravitas and reverence for the sacred mission of protecting the good people of the largest county geographically in the United States from the sociopaths who were preying upon them. He anointed Tidwell with the confidence that the department he had remade in his image would remain intact.
With Bland’s endorsement, and the assistance of his political machine, Tidwell trounced Callahan.
A tradition was thereby established. The incumbent sheriff – at that moment in time the inheritor of the Bland Political Machine – designates his successor. As had been the case with Bland choosing Tidwell in 1982, Tidwell tapped his undersheriff, Dick Williams, to succeed him in 1990. In 1994, Williams passed the mantle along to Undersheriff Gary Penrod. In 2009, while Penrod was yet sheriff after having been reelected thrice, the succession arrangement was given another twist. With between one and two years remaining on his term, Penrod arranged to resign as sheriff, designating Rod Hoops as his chosen successor. While Penrod did not have the authority to determine or appoint his successor, Bland had a generation previously transformed the sheriff into the most powerful political position in the county. It was up to the board of supervisors to determine  who would replace any of the county elected officials who held a countywide position – sheriff, district attorney, assessor/county clerk or treasurer/auditor – by appointment. In 2009, the sitting sheriff announced his intention to leave office early and called for the board of supervisors to appoint his assistant sheriff to replace him, effectively handing the political machine created by Bland and which had been passed to Tidwell, then Williams and then him to Hoops, the members of the board of supervisors, all of whom were political animals themselves who might be severely damaged in their next electoral or re-electoral effort by the opposition of the latest incarnation Bland Political Machine – merely saluted and appointed Hoops. The following year, Hoops, running in the 2010 race for sheriff as an incumbent and with the backing of the sheriff’s political machine, won the race going away, with 67 percent of the vote against two challengers. A little more than two years into his first elected term and with roughly two years remaining on that term, Hoops resigned, recommending Assistant Sheriff John McMahon as his replacement. Without asking for applicants or considering anyone other than McMahon, the board of supervisors designated him as sheriff. Two years later, in the June 2014 election corresponding with that year’s gubernatorial primary election, McMahon, as the incumbent and supported by the successor to the Bland Political Machine, proved victorious with 63 percent of the vote against two challengers. Four years later, in the 2018 election for San Bernardino County sheriff, no one came forward to run against McMahon, just as any potential challengers had shrunk from running against Bland in from 1958 until 1974.
In 2021, McMahon opted to retire with a year-and-a-half of the term he had been elected to in yet remaining, recommending that the county board of supervisors choose his undersheriff, Shannon Dicus, as his replacement. The board complied, making Dicus San Bernardino County’s 36th sheriff.
Since 2021 Dicus has bestrode San Bernardino County like a colossus.
Just as McMahon, Hoops, Penrod, Williams, Tidwell and Bland before him, Dicus, while required to stay within the parameters and guidelines set by the California Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training, otherwise has virtual autonomy over his department, enjoying, or at least seeming to enjoy, complete discretion in how the department is run, who is running it, who is promoted, who is kept in place, who is demoted, who is relieved of duty and even the timing of retirements.
Despite what many criminals incarcerated in the California prison system or San Bernardino County’s jails and a few of their attorneys maintain, Shannon Dicus has a strong belief in his own rectitude and that the organization he heads is involved in a noble cause – enforcing the law, keeping the peace, collaring the crooked, upholding justice and protecting the community. In his view, he and the department are doing a good job fulfilling that mission. By virtue of having advanced up the chain of command in the sheriff’s department, the board of supervisors having appointed him sheriff and the voters of San Bernardino County having overwhelmingly voted to keep him in place, Dicus believes he is justified in holding onto the power he commands. Having now risen to the top of a very powerful organization, Dicus has structured who mans the organization he commands in large measure on loyalty to himself and his vision for what his organization should be.
Indeed, just as was the case during the department’s Bland era, under Dicus, those members of the department who evince a can-do attitude with regard to the department’s enforcement priorities, acquiesce in the command’s personnel promotional decisions in which Dicus’s friends and personal associates are favored with high-rank, accept without question or protest the command echelon’s authority and conform with the expectation that they support the sheriff and his allies politically are the most likely to advance professionally.
Consequently, a key trait in those Dicus permits to function within the command are those who recognize his organizational goals and then get along with the program, become members of the team and demonstrate no differences or criticism of their colleagues within their colleagues within the department’s management suite.
One of the first manifestations of Dicus’s adherence to the principle of holding himself and his command staff to be beyond reproach consisted of the experience of Sergeant Randall Hansen. In 2021, during the last several months of John McMahon’s tenure as sheriff, Hansen promoted to lieutenant. After Dicus advanced to the sheriff’s position, Hansen made a hostile work environment complaint, the details for which made their way into documentation that reached Dicus’s desk. By 2023, Hansen was busted back to sergeant’s rank. While promotions among the department’s more than 2,000 personnel are often slow in coming, only in the rarest of circumstances are they reversed.
Hansen’s experience is a cautionary tale, one not unlike what happened to Michael Gilley. As was the case with Hansen, Gilley was a sergeant, and in 2020, while working in the department’s main jail, the West Valley Detention Center, he was present during a briefing at which approaching 20 department personnel, both sworn and unsworn, were present. The discussion at one point grew heated and the commander at the jail, Captain Victor Moreno, seized Gilley’s handheld radio and threw it in anger at Lieutenant Jesse Venegas, damaging the device.
At that time, Dicus was the undersheriff. Several members of the department filed complaints regarding what was characterized as Moreno’s unprofessional behavior and the tension and hostile working environment it was creating. Moreno was closely affiliated and aligned with Dicus, and would emerge in 2022 as one of the members of the department most active in fundraising on behalf of Dicus’s election campaign. Upon Dicus’s elevation to sheriff, Moreno was widely perceived as the second most likely candidate for elevation to a deputy chief’s post. Dicus considered the complaints regarding Moreno lodged by the employees at the West Valley Detention Center to be an unacceptable breach of teamwork, in which the department’s officers were expected to comply with orders handed down from above them and essentially ignore the manifestations of a superior officer’s idiosyncrasies. In the same timeframe during which Dicus became sheriff, Gilley departed from department.
The experience of Lieutenant Phill Dupper perhaps offers the most illustrative depiction of Dicus’s disdain for criticism – be it constructive or malicious – of the institution he heads and the personnel he has chosen to manage it.
In 1996, Dupper joined the sheriff’s department, five years after Dicus was hired. By virtue of their age difference and Dicus’s five-year head start in joining the department, Dupper was junior in rank to Dicus throughout their overlapping tenure with the department. Nevertheless, Dicus and Dupper grew acquainted with one another shortly after Dupper began as a deputy and grew close, given that both were on a relatively fast track of advancement and were of like mind with regard to their high regard for the department and its work. They established a routine of meeting for breakfast once or twice a month. Dupper grew accustomed to communicating to Dicus, and Dicus appeared to appreciate hearing, his concerns about issues that cropped up which he believed represented problems or challenges ongoing issues that should be redressed before they became problematic.
In January 2017, Dupper was promoted to lieutenant and assigned to the department’s information services division, which includes the central records, information technology and dispatch units. In 2018, Dicus was selected as undersheriff by then-sheriff McMahon. Also in 2018, Sarkis Ohanessian was promoted to captain and assigned to oversee the information services division, thereby becoming Dupper’s direct supervisor. Early on in his interaction with Ohannessian, Dupper became concerned about what he perceived as Ohanneessian cutting corners and engaging in activities Dupper considered improper or unethical. Dupper challenged Ohanessian directly with regard to some of his actions and then went directly to Undersheriff Shannon Dicus to express his concerns.
One such issue was a deal in late 2018 that Ohanessian was attempting to orchestrate with AT&T to replace Verizon as the provider of the mobile data computers used by sheriff’s deputies throughout the county. Dupper and his information technology staff pushed back on the AT&T deal directly to Ohannessian and higher executives, believing, and stating, the only reason the deal was entertained was due to AT&T’s donations in support of the annual San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Rodeo event.
On September 9, 2019, Ohanessian made a presentation to the command, echelon, suggesting the department adopt Motorola Vault as the department’s digital evidence storage and retrieval system. The executives signed off on it without having been informed or understanding that a formal bidding process had not been utilized to arrive at that conclusion. Ohanessian took his approval to the county’s bureau of administration where it was reviewed by the county purchasing division. The purchase was disallowed on the grounds that the vendor and the product in question had not been subject to a competitive bid. Undeterred, Ohanessian, yet determined to award the contract to Motorola, formed what was essentially a fraudulent committee consisting of the department’s information technology employees to “evaluate” the responses to a request for proposals, instructing the committee members to select and recommend Motorola Vault, thereby bypassing or, indeed, violating the terms of the bid process the county utilizes in selecting vendors. When Dupper spoke up about this situation, Ohanessian left him off the bid evaluation committee.
Dupper had further confrontations with Ohannessian regarding the department’s contacts, interactions and arrangements with other vendors and potential vendors, in particular ones that skirted county policy, state regulations and/or sound practice. In June 2020, Ohanessian forwarded an email to Dupper with a link to sheriff’s department data and a product originating with the company, Agiline. Dupper responded and said although what was being offered or proposed appeared interesting, he did not recall doing anything to authorize the company to examine department data nor did he know of any official contract with them. Dupper referenced state Criminal Justice Information Services requirements that would normally be in effect during the contractual process, intimating that Ohannessian allowed a non-backgrounded, non-approved information technology vendor into the information technology unit and provided it with access data to prepare statistics. Captain Ohanessian acknowledged in an email response that he had made a mistake.
In early June 2020, complaints were made in the records division about Deputy Chief Horace Boatwright continually being present in a female records employee’s office, during which time the door remained closed for extended periods. Records manager Sarah Garcez, who received the complaints from her employees and witnessed the activity herself, took the matter up with Dupper, who reported the complaints to Ohannessian, who said he spoke to Assistant Sheriff Lana Tomlin, Boatwright’s supervisor. According to Ohanessian, Tomlin told Boatwright to stay out of the records division, as his line of responsibility within the department did not extend there. Boatwright later promoted to undersheriff upon Dicus becoming sheriff, in which position he was, along with Dicus, responsible for overseeing promotions and transfers for the entire department.
In July 2020, Ohanessian informed Dupper the department had fallen far behind in the required reporting of statistics to the California Department of Justice. Dupper had been having challenges with the records division employee, the employee who had been involved with Boatwright, in the production of those statistics. The employee, since the issue of her extended and improper workplace meetings with Boatwright had been broached, had been increasingly challenging for Dupper, Garcez and many others in the information services division, including Ohanessian, to manage. Shortly thereafter, Dupper met with the department’s so-called “Inform Transition Team,” a group of deputies and a sheriff’s training specialist in this case relating to records keep, as to why the Department of Justice reporting was being delayed. The team told him they believed the statistics reporting was being intentionally delayed by the employee in question. Dupper emailed that information to Ohanessian, who responded by telling Dupper to treat everything with “white gloves,” conveying all involved needed to watch out because of the relationship between that employee and Boatwright.
During the summer of 2020, Dupper shared with Dicus his frustration with Ohannessian not disclosing everything to executives related to activity in information services division and the determination by the Inform team with regard to a newly-acquired records management system that had come on line the previous year in which difficulties with the software had manifested along with conflicts involving the information systems own requirements and internal processes, exacerbated by employee performance issues. The Inform Transition Team had been told by Ohannessian to not share the problems found with departmental higher-ups because, he told Dicus, Ohannessian did not want “bad” news getting to the executives, including both of the department’s then-assistant sheriffs, Lana Tomlin and Steve Higgins. As a result, the situation relating to the records management system was growing chaotic, Dupper told Dicus.
In early June 2020, several dispatch division supervisors approached Captain Ohanessian alleging a hostile work environment created by dispatch division administrator Kim Turner. Ohanessian tasked Dupper to assist him in interviewing several dispatch supervisors and the two dispatch managers answerable to Turner. At the conclusion of the interviews, Ohanessian directed Dupper to summarize the findings, which Dupper did in an email that noted elements of concern with Turner’s behavior, which were creating a liability. Several supervisors mentioned demeaning and hostile comments, stress Turner had generated, time taken off by other employees because of her, favoritism and other specific failures in leadership. Ohanessian acknowledged Dupper’s email was “on point” and said he forwarded the information up the chain of command. Despite Dupper’s efforts, he later reported, the issues relating to Turner’s disruptions in the dispatch division persisted. Rumors emerged that the matter was being “swept under the rug” because Turner assisted Dicus in writing his master’s thesis. A few years later, after Dupper was no longer in the information services division and neither the past nor more recently emerging complaints pertaining to Turner were addressed forcing an administrative inquiry, she left the dispatch division administrator position.
Dicus, as the undersheriff, had come to perceive Dupper’s repeated and continuous reference to problems and inadequate supervisorial/leadership responses to those problems as an indication that Dupper was unsuited for a leadership role in the organization or unable to fit in as a team player. In August 2020, shortly after Dupper had sent comprehensive and significant evidence of and emails regarding issues in the information services division to department administration, including Dicus, Dupper was abruptly transferred out of the information services division to shift work at the West Valley Detention Center. Dupper had made no such change-of-assignment request. Unbeknownst to him, it was Dicus who had ordered, essentially unilaterally on his authority as undersheriff pertaining to personnel utilization, that he be moved to the department’s main jail. To his inquiries, Dupper was told by department executives they thought he wanted to be placed there. Dupper, who at that time was in the upper third among lieutenants in the department in terms of seniority, was shocked, as jail duty is normally an assignment given to deputies newly arriving to the department or recently promoted sergeants and lieutenants. Rarely are any sworn department personnel who have already worked in a specialized position detailed to the jail, unless they have engaged in action that landed them in trouble or for which they were disciplined.
Dupper was given a week to wrap up his three-and-a-half years at the information services division to report for shift work. On the same transfer list to be sent to the jail was another lieutenant whose professional conduct had placed his law enforcement career in significant jeopardy and who was facing discipline, which resulted, ultimately, in his being demoted back to deputy. Word around the department was that Dupper was being punished for speaking up.
After the transfer list was announced, Dupper was contacted by several members of the sheriff’s executive staff, including Sheriff McMahon. Dupper informed McMahon that despite multiple members of his executive staff believing he wanted to be transferred to the jail, that was not the case. McMahon apologized to Dupper for the confusion, saying he was not sure of the reason Dupper was sent to the West Valley Detention Center, but did not rescind the transfer order.
From the outset of his time at the West Valley Detention Center, Dupper had a testy relationship with Captain Victor Moreno, then the commanding officer at the jail in Rancho Cucamonga. At that time, the department was under a federally-issued consent decree that it redress conditions deemed dangerous to inmates at the West Valley Detention Center. Upon Dupper showing up to his new duty station and introducing himself to his senior officer, Moreno told him he was dismayed with Dupper being assigned to him, indicating he believed Dupper was in some kind of trouble with the department generally or the department’s top command, and that the general impression those within the department’s command echelon had was that Dupper lacked discretion in that he could not keep his mouth shut with regard to things those with any sense in the organization would rather keep a lid on. “We have a lot going on here and I don’t need someone like you,” Moreno said.
Moreno also informed Dupper that given his new assignment at the jail, he would no longer be able to serve on the Loma Linda City Council, to which he had been elected in 2014 and reelected in 2018 and 2022, and that Dupper would further need to resign his position as an adjunct college professor. That night, Dupper emailed Moreno, giving him a description of what his off-duty activities entailed, indicating he had been engaged in them for several years while employed with the sheriff’s department. Moreno’s single-word email response to Dupper was “No.” Dupper forwarded the email chain to Undersheriff Dicus.
While at the jail, Dupper, a lieutenant, was instructed by Moreno to report to a sergeant and two probationary lieutenants who had only recently been promoted from the rank of sergeant.
Dupper, unaware that he had been transferred to the jail on Dicus’s orders because Dicus had misgivings about Dupper’s propensity to explicitly inform the senior administrators in the department about the overall significance and minutiae of problems in the divisions where he worked and the shortcomings in the professionalism of his colleagues, relayed to Dicus his concerns about what he was witnessing at the jail. These extended to a multitude of issues, all of which represented potential liability on the part of the department and the county, including the cover-up of a Fentanyl-related inmate death, sexual harassment of female deputies, and unprofessional communication and activity on the part of management staff.
In February 2021, Dupper, yet unaware that Undersheriff Dicus was responsible for his transfer to the West Valley Detention Center or that Moreno was a Dicus ally within the sheriff’s department hierarchy, met with Dicus at an offsite location, where he informed Dicus he believed he was being subjected to a hostile work environment.
Shortly thereafter, an internal affairs investigation by the department’s professional standards division was initiated, one in which Dupper was interviewed. Dupper was never, however, informed of the investigation’s outcome. As that investigation was commenced, around March 2021, Dupper was moved to another jail, the Glen Helen Rehabilitation Center. While at Glen Helen, Dupper was given an annual performance evaluation, in which he was scored lower than in previous years, with the notation that he was discontented about being transferred to the jail, and he was passed over for promotion.
In May 2021, it was revealed internally within the department that Sheriff McMahon intended to retire prior to the expiration of his term in 2022 and McMahon made a formal public announcement to that effect the following month. The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors opened applications for the position of Sheriff as part of the process to appoint someone to finish out McMahon’s term, although indications are that the sheriff’s succession was predetermined by an understanding that the supervisors would acquiesce in selecting McMahon’s recommendation. Dupper applied for the position along with Cliff Harris, a former deputy sheriff in both San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Within the application’s supplemental questions, Dupper asserted one of his motivations for seeking office consisted of the department’s lack of internal procedural justice and his goal or plan for how he would address it, were he to be appointed sheriff. During the board of supervisors’ public meeting at which the candidates presented themselves and were subject to questions from the board, Dupper said, “The department acts like a good ol’ boys club where personal relationships matter more than qualifications or efficacy. In law enforcement, sometime we are very close-minded.”
Dupper said the department’s personnel were “looking for guidance. They’re looking for leadership and sometimes were not giving that to them, and I think we can do better. I believe our people are good people, but they need direction and we need to set clear directions and everybody needs to follow them. The chief complaint that I get from a lot of our employees is that they believe executives are held to a different standard than they are, and that breeds internal distrust of the organization. I believe that we are way lacking in our total organizational structure. I personally struggle as to whether the office of the sheriff is fully aware of how things have progressed, and I’m not sure. I think John McMahon is a good man, but I’m not sure how much of this stuff he is aware of and chose to overlook.”
When then-Supervisor Janice Rutherford asked Dupper whether he was “alleging that current leadership of the sheriff lies to members of the department,” he responded, “Yes.”
Dupper told the supervisors, “I believe you should establish an oversight board or committee to look into the organization. As the five most powerful elected officials in the county, that unfortunately falls on your shoulders. I think its needed and I think its time. We’re in a world where accountability is paramount.”
On July 17, 2021, Dicus was appointed sheriff.
During Dicus’s time as sheriff, Dupper’s career has stalled out. Despite what he contends is his suitability for promotion to captain and beyond, he has remained in the rank of lieutenant.
On August 9, 2021, Dupper met with Dicus, Assistant Sheriff Sam Fisk and Deputy Chief Chris Fisher. In the meeting, Dupper laid out a timeline of issues from his work in the information services division, West Valley Detention Center and Glen Helen Rehabilitation Center. In his response, Dicus made clear that he considered Dupper to be “selfish” and that he was “lucky” to have been promoted as far as he had been. He further stated that Dupper could not “get along” with the captains he worked for within the information services division and at the West Valley Detention Center and that he had “made a lot of people angry” with what he had told the board of supervisors about the department. At that point, Dicus disclosed that he had intentionally reassigned Dupper to the jail.
In March 2022, Dupper was transferred to his current assignment at the Highland Sheriff’s Station.
Dupper, who has been eligible to promote to Captain since January 2019, has consistently been passed over for promotion. While Dupper has been in the rank of lieutenant, at least 57 lieutenants have been promoted to captain, most of those were made directly while Dicus has been sheriff. Of those 57, five were promoted to captain had more time on as a lieutenant than Dupper. The remaining 52 lieutenants promoted to captain during that timeframe had spent an equal or less amount of time as lieutenant than Dupper. Currently, there are 28 captain positions in the department. Several of those promoted to captain while Dupper was eligible for promotion to captain have either been promoted again or have retired from the department.
During Dicus’s tenure as sheriff, the number of elevated-rank and command positions in the department have increased substantially. In 2019, under Sheriff McMahon, there was a single undersheriff, two assistant sheriffs and six deputy chiefs. In 2023, the year after Dicus, running as the incumbent, was elected sheriff with 74.27 percent of the vote, the number of deputy chief positions had jumped to eight. At present, there is still one undersheriff, assisted by three assistant sheriffs and 11 deputy chiefs.
While Dupper has remained at lieutenant rank, a number of the issues he raised – or attempted to raise – with senior administration exacerbated themselves into major problems or scandals.
In 2023, Russian mobsters, working from Eastern Europe, hacked the sheriff’s department’s computer system, taking control of data storage and retrieval capabilities and communications capabilities. The cyberattack utilized ransomware that could not be disinfected from the operating system without the application of an unlocking algorithm. Efforts to salvage the system were unsuccessful. The department’s options were limited to either giving in to those who had hijacked the system and complying with their demands or the complete abandonment of its computers together with their hardware and software and the substitution of another system and comprehensive replacement of the stationary and mobile computing devices used by the department’s deputies, higher-ranking officers and support personnel. Ultimately, the department chose the former course, paying a $1.1 million ransom, $588,148 of which was covered by the county’s insurance carrier. It was belatedly acknowledged that cybersecurity precautions Dupper and other members of the information services division had been advocating but which Ohanessian had countermanded would have likely prevented the interruption from occurring.
In response to mounting complaints from other department employees at the West Valley Detention Center, Captain Moreno was transferred to the coroner’s division, where he was entrusted with managing operations there. While in that post, he entered into what was described as “an inappropriate extramarital relationship” with Deputy Coroner Investigator Rebecca London. That relationship apparently ended badly. London later reported that she was receiving threatening/harassing phone calls late at night from individuals acting on behalf of Captain Moreno. In late 2024, Moreno was transferred out of the coroner’s division to oversee the Fontana Sheriff’s Station. That transfer was made, department sources report, because senior department personnel learned of the deteriorating circumstance in the coroner’s office that had come about because of the situation involving Moreno and London. Nevertheless, Moreno and others maintained that he remained in the good graces of the department’s top commanders and was on track to be promoted to deputy chief upon the next vacation of an assistant sheriff position, which would involve a deputy chief being elevated to that spot, creating a corresponding vacancy among the deputy chief roster.
On January 5, 2025, Deputy London died by her own hand, having committed suicide, it was widely reported, as a consequence of the circumstance involving Moreno. London’s death investigation was conducted by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.
At that point, the scandal could no longer be contained, and an ad hoc internal departmental panel was formed to look into the matter. After the delivery of a report and a hearing of the panel which ended in a recommendation that Moreno be terminated, Dicus overruled that finding. Instead, Moreno voluntarily retired.
In August 2024, Dupper filed an unfair employment/whistleblower lawsuit suit against San Bernardino County, under California Labor Code §1102.5, alleging he was being retaliated against.
Dupper’s experience is paralleled by that of Stephen Miller.
Miller is an attorney and former federal judge, who from January 1998 to February 2005 served as a part-time United States magistrate judge in the Central District of California.
Miller left the federal bench upon being appointed, in January 2005, by then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to one of three regional senior assistant inspector general positions to assist the California Inspector General in monitoring federal court orders that grew out of the settlement of a lawsuit involving the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The inspector general and his support network of attorneys and investigators were tasked with the primary duties of overseeing and monitoring peace officer misconduct investigations and discipline in the areas of the so-called blue code of silence, peace officer honesty and integrity, and the use of lethal force.
Miller was a volunteer member of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Team.
A major feature of the search and rescue team is its access to sheriff’s department aircraft, which are of tremendous utility in carrying out assignments in the varied geographical expanse of San Bernardino County, which includes 18,697 square miles of desert, the vast majority of the San Bernardino Mountains and the San Gorgonio Wilderness – including 11,503-foot elevation San Gorgonio Peak, 11,287-foot elevation Iron Mountain, 11,205-foot elevation Jepsen Peak, 11,010-foot elevation Bighorn Mountain, 10,871 foot elevation Anderson Peak, 10,821-foot elevation Charlton Peak, 10,760-foot elevation Doubletop Mountain, 10,680-foot elevation Shields Peak 10,649-foot elevation San Bernardino Peak, 10,288-foot elevation Grinnell Mountain and 10,178-foot elevation Lake Peak, 9,954-foot elevation Sugarloaf Mountain 8,767-foot elevation Black Peak, 7,276-foot elevation Little Bear Mountain and 6,771 Big Bear Mountain and 5,737-foot elevation Pinnacles Peak near Lake Arrowhead – and the eastern portion of the San Gabriel Mountains with its 10,588-foot elevation Mt. San Antonio, 8,859-foot elevation Cucamonga Peak, 8,696-foot elevation Ontario Peak and 8,441-foot elevation Bighorn Peak.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Aviation Unit operates 18 aircraft, including 13 helicopters and five fixed wing planes. These include six Airbus H125 helicopters, oneEurocopter AS350 B3 helicopter, three Bell UH-1H medium helicopters, a single Bell 212 medium helicopter and two Subaru Bell 412EPX high-performance utility helicopters (added in 2022, along with two Mahindra Air Van airplanes and three Beechcraft King Air airplanes.
Miller’s participation on the search and rescue team put him close contact with the department’s aviation unit. As a consequence, he became aware of multiple incidents which caused him and others concern. These included:
• Sergeant Dan Futscher, one of the department’s helicopter pilots, violated federal regulations, the pilot operating handbook and station policy by failing to conduct a proper preflight inspection before the start-up of an Airbus H125 helicopter, whereupon, a wrench left on the rotor head was flung from the helicopter’s rotor blades, the wrench was cut in half and parts of the wrench flew proximate to at least three mechanics, any of whom could have been killed.
• A sergeant within the aviation division told department personnel who were aware of what occurred during that particular Airbus H125 start-up that it was not necessary to prepare a safety report.
• A failure by Corporal Edward Leon, another department pilot, to conduct a proper preflight inspection, which resulted in an unlatched cowling during a flight carrying rescue team members who were engaging in airborne night hoist training. Had the unsecured cowling advanced into the rotor system during training or flight, the entire crew could have been killed or catastrophically injured.
• Leon attempted to have his subordinates remain silent and say nothing about the unlatched cowling.
• Sergeant Jon Anderson directed Leon not to complete or file a safety report with regard to the unsecured cowling.
• The incident relating to the unlatched cowling was not logged in the aircraft flight log, and an aviation division safety officer did not learn about it and mechanics did not conduct a precautionary inspection relating to it until 30 days after the occurrence.
• When a safety officer, after being directed to do so by a lieutenant, called Sergeant Jon Anderson, who was the senior officer on call the night of the incident involving the unsecured cowling, to ask about the absence of a safety report, Anderson dressed the safety officer down, saying, “I am a sergeant and I made the decision.” Shortly after this first phone conversation, Anderson called the safety officer and repeated, “I am a sergeant. You don’t call me on my day off and question a sergeant.”
• After the safety officer sought to conduct a review of the incident involving the unsecured cowling, Leon suggested to other personnel within the aviation division that the safety officer was being “a rat” for proceeding with the inquiry.
• Sergeant Jon Anderson told aviation division personnel it was not necessary to prepare a safety report pertaining to the unsecured cowling.
• Sergeant Anderson failed on one occasion to manage, monitor and oversee an MD500 helicopter’s engine start that resulted in a “hot start” and complete destruction of the helicopter’s engine at a cost of approximately $100,000.
• No investigation of the circumstances relating to the destruction of the MD500 helicopter engine and Anderson’s alleged negligence in allowing it to occur was carried out, nor any report relating to it was written.
• No discipline relating to the engine destruction was meted out.
• Sergeant Anderson was receiving flight instruction or training from a sheriff’s department civilian flight instructor in a sheriff’s department or Inland Regional Narcotics Enforcement Team airplane.
• A corporal assigned to the sheriff’s department’s aviation unit who is a helicopter pilot, airplane pilot and flight instructor refused to provide Anderson with airplane flight instruction because he believed doing so would be an inappropriate use of sheriff’s department or Inland Regional Narcotics Enforcement Team aircraft.
• Sgt. Leon, having recently been promoted to sergeant, violated Emergency Operations Division Policy 3.15.0 by allowing the captain overseeing the Colorado River Sheriff’s Station and a jail deputy, neither of whom are licensed pilots, to manipulate the flight controls, i.e., fly the helicopter, while the flight officer(s) were seated in the rear of the aircraft.
• Sergeant Anderson rear-ended another vehicle while driving a sheriff’s “takehome” vehicle on his day off, during which his operation/driving of the vehicle was not authorized.
• Anderson was not disciplined for his unauthorized use or damage to the vehicle as a result of the collision, in which he was found to have been at fault.
Miller learned that a rationale, at least in part, for withholding the reports of the incidents in question was so, he would subsequently suggest in a court filing, Leon, Futscher and Anderson “could have a clean record for promotion.”
Miller’s former role as one of three assistant senior assistant inspector generals overseeing the federal court orders relating to the monitoring of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sensitized him to efforts by law enforcement agencies to engage in a code of silence, cover-ups, attempted cover-ups, characterizing employees as disloyal for insisting on reporting errors or misconduct by their colleagues and retaliating against them for doing so, failing to conduct internal investigations or otherwise carrying out ones that were superficial, inadequate or shams, while meting out inconsistent discipline. Such inconsistent discipline was manifest, he saw, in the way in which roughly a month-and-a-half after Sergeant Futscher’s life-threatening preflight inspection failure, Futscher wrote up a flight officer for a lack of attention to detail when the flight officer allowed a hangar door to contact a rotor blade that resulted in no damage.
Sergeant Mike Gilley, who had been assigned to the aviation unit, on April 20, 2021 submitted by email directly to Sheriff McMahon, Undersheriff Dicus, Assistant Sheriff Fisk, and Deputy Chief Robert O’Brine a report/complaint alleging safety procedure shortcomings.
Miller shared Gilley’s concern about the several incidents relating to the department’s helicopters and the failures to properly log reports pertaining to them. Moreover, Miller concurred with Gilley that those up the chain of command should be kept abreast of what was happening within the department’s divisions and it was his perception that the department’s administration was being deprived of information with regard to the fashion in which lower level officers and those members of the department they directly oversaw were not being properly monitored or held accountable.
Miller knew of Gilley’s report to McMahon, Dicus, Fisk, and O’Brine. When, after three months elapsed and no response or report regarding the complaint had been forthcoming, Miller went outside the chain of command by hand delivering a written complaint dated July 22, 2021 directly to the sheriff’s department’s internal affairs division administrative sergeant, which raised the issues in Gilley’s April 22 email.
On August 9, 2021, Miller had an encounter with Anderson in which the sergeant chastised him for submitting a written safety report and sought to dissuade him from raising safety issues in written report submissions in the future.
When, after what Miller considered a decent interval, the complaint he had filed on July 22, 2021 did not result in any report, resolution or tangible reaction, Miller again went outside the chain of command and beyond the confines of the sheriff’s department and hand delivered a complaint dated December 16, 2021 directly to the office of compliance and ethics within the San Bernardino County Human Resources Department. In that complaint, Miller raised the issues he had previously delved into with the sheriff’s department’s internal affairs division, while broadening it to include what he referenced as “failures by Sheriff Dicus and his subordinates to complete an objective, thorough and timely investigation of the July 22, 2021 misconduct complaint,” extending to “a failure to interview, or even attempting to interview, the petitioner [i.e., Miller] as the complaining party” and “failing to interview witnesses and subjects of investigation.”
Subsequently, when the issues he had raised in his July 22, 2021 and December 16, 2021 complaints were not dealt with in what he considered to be a timely or forthright manner, Miller on February 16, 2022 lodged a complaint with the San Bernardino County auditor-controller and the office of compliance and ethics within the San Bernardino County Human Resources Department.
After the county auditor-controller’s office, its fraud, waste and abuse hotline, the county human resources department and its office of compliance and ethics failed to communicate with him regarding his February 15, 2022 complaint, Miller on July 18, 2022, submitted yet another written complaint of retaliation and wasteful spending with the county auditor-controller’s office and to the county human resources department and its office of compliance and ethics.
The December 16, 2021, February 15, 2022 and July 18, 2022 complaints, in addition to referencing the previously raised issues relating to hazards, lack of compliance with safety protocols and lack of accountability within the sheriff’s department, extended to the failure of both the sheriff’s department and the county itself to engage in a meaningful examination, or come to a resolution, of the issues raised in his previous complaints, as well as what Miller termed “retaliation,” he was experiencing as a result of filing the safety reports and complaints.
By the summer of 2022, the dismay with Miller over his persistence in raising issues relating to conditions within the search and rescue/aviation division, the comportment of department personnel and his propensity for filing compounding complaints no longer confined itself to the sheriff’s department. The auditor-controller’s office, its fraud, waste and abuse hotline, the county human resources department and its office of compliance and ethics made no response to Miller with regard to his July 18, 2022 complaint, nor did any of those entities interview him as a complaining party and victim in response to that filing. Rather, according to a lawsuit Miller subsequently filed, “the decision was made to wait a short time and then terminate the petitioner [i.e., Miller] from his reserve deputy sheriff and volunteer air medic position in retaliation for making repeated complaints of
misconduct, safety violations and wasteful spending.”
On October 11, 2022, Miller was provided with a September 30, 2022 interoffice memo from Assistant Sheriff Sam Fisk stating there were “no findings” of any violation of county policy or misconduct after an investigation by the department’s internal affairs division with regard to the July 22, 2021 complaint he had filed.
The county was as noncommittal as the sheriff’s department in reaction to Miller’s complaints.
On February 13, 2023 Human Resources Department Employee Relations Division Chief Eric Guerra sent a letter to the auditor-controller fraud, waste and abuse hotline regarding the internal investigations the complaints Miller had filed on February 15, 2022 and July 18, 2022. Guerra’s letter informed and represented to the auditor-controller that after the sheriff’s department’s internal affairs division investigation turned up “no findings” of any violations of county policy or misconduct.
On March 30, 2023, Miller submitted or mailed a written misconduct complaint to the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors chairman, vice chairman and the county’s chief executive officer. In that complaint, Miller reiterated all of his safety concerns relating to the sheriff’s aviation division. He further asserted in the complaint that Sheriff McMahon and/or Sheriff Dicus failed to properly adjudicate his July 22, 2021 complaint, that the sheriff, undersheriff, an assistant sheriff, and a deputy chief, after receiving notice of serious misconduct, failed to investigate and initiate disciplinary action and that despite whatever investigation was or was not conducted did not come to a determination that the factual allegations contained in the complaint were untrue. The complaint further alleged that Guerra’s February 13, 2023 letter was a highly unethical attempt to conceal and cover up peace officer misconduct in the sheriff’s department. Guerra’s action was further intended, Miller contended, to conceal the failure by senior sheriff’s department managers to properly adjudicate misconduct allegations in compliance with sheriff’s department policies and procedures adopted pursuant to Penal Code section 832.5(a), which requires that law enforcement agencies carry out investigations of misdeeds by sworn peace officers. Miller also maintained that Guerra’s action prevented the auditor-controller’s division committed to rooting out fraud, waste and abuse from conducting any further investigation or inquiry into misconduct, safety violations and wasteful spending at the sheriff’s aviation unit and that it misled and defrauded the county’s auditor-controller’s office into believing there was no merit to the complaints of misconduct, safety violations, wasteful spending and retaliation.”
Before Miller was terminated as a reserve sheriff’s deputy and a medic volunteer with the sheriff’s department’s search and rescue division, during an encounter with Leon during which the subject of the unlatched cowling came up, the pilot acknowledged he should have been disciplined with regard to the incident.
Futscher was promoted to lieutenant, whereupon he became the manager of the aviation unit.
Miller, after seeking for four years to have the department address the safety issues he first raised in 2021 and for more than three years to have county officials fully examine what he believes is the sheriff’s department command’s unwillingness to hold its employees accountable, on September 22, 2025 filed a petition with the San Bernardino Superior Court for a writ of mandamus in which San Bernardino County and the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors are named as respondents. In his suit, Miller is requesting that the court find that the county and the board of supervisors “failed to investigate, adjudicate, and retain [a] misconduct complaint, failed to provide [a] notice of disposition and to compel respondents to investigate,
properly adjudicate and retain [a] misconduct complaint [and] provide [a] notice of disposition.” The lawsuit, in which Miller is representing himself, requests that the issues and matters the suit encompassed be referred to a grand jury, the California Attorney General’s Office and the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.
In his filing, Miller makes clear he did not make the first complaint to sheriff’s department higher-ups with regard to safety issues within the sheriff’s department’s aviation division, as the omplaint filed by Sergeant Mike Gilley on April 21, 2021 predated all of Miller’s. It is Miller’s contention that complaints made against law enforcement agencies in general or law enforcement personnel cannot be resolved with a “no finding” or “no findings” pronouncement. Rather, according to Miller, an internal affairs investigation should reach a determination of, variously, either sustained, not sustained, unfounded, exonerated or frivolous.
By not adjudicating Gilley’s complaint and providing no notice of disposition with regard to it as well as by making no determination with regard to his complaint, Miller asserted in his lawsuit, Sheriffs McMahon and Dicus and their command staffs shirked their duty to get to the bottom of credible accusations of misfeasance on the part of members of the sheriff’s department.
“Sheriff McMahon, Sheriff Dicus and the sheriff’s department breached their nondiscretionary, ministerial and mandatory duty to conduct an investigation sufficient to determine whether misconduct allegations should be sustained, not sustained, unfounded, exonerated, or frivolous in response to an April 20, 2021 complaint involving the sheriff’s department aviation unit,” the lawsuit states. The sheriff’s department similarly breached its duty when it failed to make a sustained, not sustained, unfounded, exonerated, or frivolous finding with regard to Miller’s July 22, 2021 complaint, according to the suit. Furthermore, the county’s human resources department and the office of compliance and ethics and Sheriff Dicus breached their duty when they failed to conduct investigations adequate to reach an accurate conclusion with regard to Miller’s December 16, 2021, February 15, 2022, and July 18, 2022, complaints regarding the sheriff’s department aviation unit. Futhermore, according to Miller, the auditor-controller’s office, its fraud, waste and abuse hotline employees and Sheriff Dicus breached their duty to conduct investigations sufficient to determine the validity of misconduct allegations regarding the sheriff’s department aviation unit contained in Miller’s February 15, 2022 and July 18, 2022 complaints. The suit also alleges San Bernardino County and the board of supervisors breached their duty to conduct adequate investigations into the matters outlined in Miller’s March 30, 2023 complaint.
The county, the board of supervisors, the auditor-controller, the county department of human resources and the sheriff’s department all undermined the California Public Records Act and the San Bernardino County’s Sunshine Ordinance by denying access to records that are subject to production in response to California Public Records Act requests when Miller filed such requests relating to the investigations touching on the sheriff’s department’s aviation unit, according to the suit.
“The Petitioner seeks a writ of mandamus requiring San Bernardino County and the board of supervisors to complete an investigation of the March 30, 2023 complaint allegations in full and complete compliance with Penal Code section 832.5 and sheriffs department procedures adopted and published pursuant to Penal Code section 832.5(a)(1),” the lawsuit states.
Miller’s suit contains 19 causes of action and runs to 137 pages.
Miller is also representing Gilley in a lawsuit he filed against San Bernardino County, the board of supervisors, the sheriff’s department, the auditor-controller’s office, Dicus, Auditor/Controller/Treasurer/Tax Collector Ensen Mason and former San Bernardino County Chief Executive Officer Leonard Gonzalez.
In his lawsuit, Dupper is represented by Oshea Orchid and Rahul Sethi of the Val Verde-based Sethi Orchid Miner LLP law firm.
Dupper’s suit alleges that despite being eligible for promotion to captain for six years, achieving consistently high-scores in the objective evaluations of his suitability for advancement to the rank of captain and the endorsements of many or most of the officers at command levels in the department, he has been passed over for promotion because, according to Orchid and Sethi, he “reported violations of the law.”
Orchid, in taking Dicus’s deposition in preparation for going to trial in Dupper’s case, obtained what is perhaps the most succinct response to the issues brought forth by Dupper, Gilley and Miller. He and his department are, Dicus fully believes, dedicated to upholding the law and protecting the citizens of San Bernardino County from those who would prey upon them. As such, he and the sheriffs who have served San Bernardino County before him have recruited talented and dedicated law enforcement professionals into the department, he believes, and he is empowered and is at liberty to elevate and promote those who in his judgment will best carry out their assignments in the ways that are consistent with his vision for the department and the values he personally embodies, which is his right as the elected sheriff of San Bernardino County. It is his choice to elevate those who are doers who get with the program and execute well and without reservation the orders they are given, and are willing to set aside any reservations they have, if indeed they have them, in order to be valued members of the team. He is not obliged, Dicus believes, to put up with naysayers who are unwilling or unable to get along with the other members of the team or who can’t follow the lead of those who have risen to positions of authority within its command structure.
Dicus, to whom was passed the torch once gripped by Frank Bland three and four generations ago and held by a succession of five dedicated lawmen thereafter, has now become the embodiment of the law, at least within the expansive confines of San Bernardino County, and, as such, need not put up with those who question the application of authority, most particularly his own.

A year after the Upland City Council in a calculated and secretive move, eradicated the their city’s mobile home rent stabilization ordinance that had been in place for more than two-and-a-half decades, its members Monday night voted 3-to-2 to reestablish an altered version of the measure that will leave most future such tenants vulnerable to exorbitant price escalations and make it difficult for current residents to sell their coaches.
While many or indeed most of the city’s 2,223 mobile home residents and their family members were heartened by the city council’s action this week in stemming what had been the opportunity for mobile home park owners to engage in a year of unbridled lease increases, a cross section of the city’s population who had benefited by the previous ordinance and are now subject to the disadvantage the redrafted passages of the ordinance to be put in place as a consequence of Monday night’s action sophisticated enough to understand the significance of the cards they have now been dealt as a result of the city’s sleight-of-hand are more convinced than ever that there was and continues some order of collusion involving the mayor, at least one and perhaps two of the city council members, city management, the city attorney, the city’s development services division and the city clerk with a handful of the city’s mobile home park owners.
Artifacts that remain from the city’s action taken last year demonstrate that city officials at the senior level of management sought to hide the erasure of the rental protections that had been put into the Upland City Code some time prior to the Turn of the Millennium, and had carried it out with the connivance of City Clerk Carrie Johnson, who had to have been cognizant of the implication of the action, as was the city council, which considered the matter as a stand-alone item at its last May 2025 meeting and in a follow-on “second-reading” of the ordinance at its first June 2025 meeting.
The complete and radical undoing of the mobile home rent stabilization measure was deliberately hidden in a single single legislative bundle, such that it was easily overlooked by the public at large and those most directly impacted by it. The public record shows that the agenda for the May 27, 2025 Upland City Council meeting listed as item number 13 a “business item” consisting of the “consideration of an omnibus ordinance amending various sections of the Upland Municipal Code.” Upland City Council meetings are normally held on the second and fourth Monday night of the month. In this case, the meeting was held on Tuesday evening, because of that week’s conflict with the three-day Memorial Day Weekend.
Nowhere in the agenda for the May 27, 2025 meeting is there a description of what those “various sections” of the city code consist of. Nevertheless, technically and legalistically, the city was in compliance with the requirement contained in the Ralph M. Brown Act that it make public disclosure of the action ahead of the vote. The Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law, requires that an agenda providing a bare-bones description of what is to be discussed and/or voted upon by a local legislative body be posted at least 72 hours in advance.
At the May 27, 2025 meeting, the discussion with regard to the omnibus ordinance was extremely abbreviated. Though the item was up for discussion during what was considered to be a public hearing, no members of the public offered a comment on the proposed changes. The council considered the item on the basis of the ordinance’s title only and waived the necessity of have to read the full contents of the ordinance, which further obscured what was occurring, noting only that Ordinance No. 1997 “amending various sections of the Upland Municipal Code as specified” and was being given the first of two approvals by the council, pursuant to a vote.
Under the California Government Code, local governmental entities, such as cities or counties need to pass an ordinance with a majority vote of the government in question’s elected authorizing panel – the city council or board of supervisors – in a “first reading” at an open public meeting followed by an approving vote of the majority of panel members in a “second” reading at another meeting, such that the ordinance goes into effect 30 days following the second vote.
At the May 27, 2025 meeting, on a motion by Councilman James Breitling that was seconded by Councilman Rudy Zuniga, the item making the blanket changes to the Upland Municipal Code was passed unanimously.
The matter was then scheduled for a second reading, i.e., consideration and vote, at the city council’s June 9, 2025 meeting. In this way, it was the vote to take place at the June 9 meeting that provided the final determination as to whether the omnibus ordinance would go into effect.
The City of Upland in this case, through the personage of clerk Keri Johnson, had arranged, at a cost of $522.87, for the largest circulation daily newspaper in Upland, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, to publish on June 3, 2025 a legal notice of the pending finalization of the adoption of the ordinance, containing a summary of the omnibus ordinance.
With the all-capital-letter caption of “Notice Of Proposed Adoption of Ordinance No. 1997,” the legal advertisement stated, “Please Take Notice that on June 9, 2025 at 6:00 p.m. in the Council Chambers, Upland City Hall, 460 North Euclid Avenue, Upland, California, the City Council of the City of Upland shall consider the adoption of Ordinance No. 1997, entitled ‘An Ordinance of the City Council of the City of Upland amending various sections of the Upland Municipal Code as specified.’ The aforementioned ordinance was introduced for first reading on May 27, 2025 by the City Council.”
A summary of the omnibus ordinance followed, stating the city council’s anticipated action would “amend and update various sections of the Upland Municipal Code as part of the City of Upland’s annual review” of its codes.
“First,” the summary stated, “the ordinance would amend Section 2.12.010 to remove the requirement that the city manager’s appointment of the director of finance must be approved by the city council. Second, the ordinance would update Section 2.14.020(C) to permit the city clerk’s designee to issue confirmation of receipt of campaign disclosure statements required by the Political Reform Act. Third, the ordinance would amend Section 2.48.090 to provide that notices inviting bids under the city’s formal bid procedure shall be posted on the city’s website instead of in a newspaper of general circulation, and to remove the requirement that the city solicit bids from a bidder’s list. Fourth, the ordinance would update Section 2.56.060(C) to increase the city’s gift limit under its conflict of interest regulations from $420.00 to $630.00. Fifth, the ordinance would amend multiple sections of Chapter 3.32, “Claims Against City.” The ordinance would replace Sections 3.32.020, 3.32.030 and 3.32.040 regarding facsimile signatures of warrants, payroll checks, and submitting certified manual signatures. Additionally, the ordinance would replace Section 3.32.050, regarding operation of the city’s check signing machine, in its entirety. Sixth, the Ordinance would delete Chapter 5.68, “Mobilehome Rent Review” in its entirety. Finally, the Ordinance would remove remove Section 13.12.050(G) (2), defining eligibility criteria for discounted water charges under the city’s water service regulations.”
Of note, is that the summary was generally more forthcoming with respect to the nature of the other elements of the city code being altered than with respect to the mobile home rent increase limitations, which was made in the most cursory and indirect manner.
At the June 9 meeting, the discussion of and vote on the omnibus ordinance was not allotted a separate public hearing but rather placed on the meeting’s consent calendar along with 16 other items. The consent calendar is normally reserved for items that are considered routine and noncontroversial, and which are grouped together to be collectively voted upon with a single vote. On a motion by Councilman Breitling seconded by Councilman Zuniga, the consent calendar was unanimously approved by the mayor and council.
Subsequent to the June 9 meeting, on June 16, at cost to the city of $537.14, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin ran a notice of the adoption of Ordinance No. 1997, which again contained a summary of the ordinance’s contents, essentially identical to that contained in the previously published notice.
The appearances of the May 27 and June 9 agendas, the action at the meetings and the legal notices garnered no citizen/resident attention.
The original Upland Mobile Home Rent Stabilization Ordinance capped annual space rent increases at $34 per month or 7 percent, whichever was greater, specifically upon the sale/transfer of the mobile home. In terms of general year-to-year increases, the historic city code limited the maximum annual lease space increase to 3 percent. With the second vote on approving the omnibus ordinance on June 9, 2025, those limits were eliminated as of July 9, 2025.
The matter remained pretty much unremarked until February of this year, when the landlords at three of the city’s five mobile home parks informed their tenants they were going to increase their lease payments by 5 percent. There were reports that the other two mobile home parks were on the verge of or had already given indication they were to seek lease increases of 10 percent. In reaction to some immediate protests to the 5 percent increase, the representative of a corporation that owns one of the city’s mobile home parks said tenants should gird themselves for a 10 percent increase next year.
The Sentinel was given information in April indicating that the ownership/management of the mobile home parks remained silent over the first eight to nine months of the mobile home rent stabilization ordinance being deleted from the Upland Municipal Code as a favor or benefit to the mayor and four members of the city council, who wanted to keep their constituents in the dark about what they had done for as long as they could for strategic reason, perhaps related to this year’s upcoming election in which Second District Councilman James Breitling, Third District Councilman Carlos Garcia and Fourth District Councilman Rudy Zuniga are due to stand for reelection. The owners of the mobile home parks, collectively and singly in most cases, sincerely believed that the eradication of the Mobilehome Rent Review/Mobile Home Rent Control Ordinance was a positive development that was long past due.
From the perspective of apartment complex owners, single family rental unit owners and mobile home owners, rent control is questionable from a constitutional standpoint in that, conceptually, it can be construed as a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s “takings clause” or the Fourteenth Amendment “due process” requirement and deprives landlords of their property rights through limiting the value of their land or the use thereof. In addition, there is a case to be made that rent increase limitations can deprive those who own that property of just compensation. Nevertheless, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld rent control as a valid exercise of state and local government “police powers” to protect the public welfare, adjudging that putting a ceiling on what a property owner can charge to utilize living quarters does not qualify as an unconstitutional forced “taking” of property under either the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments.
In private and in some cases publicly the owners of mobile home parks in Upland have not been hesitant to assert that the expense of owning, operating and maintaining a mobile home park is not insubstantial and that there are risks involved that can render the parks unprofitable and/or marginally profitable. Ownership must deal with empty spaces in the parks that can be difficult to fill and payment delinquencies are a common experience which will ultimately entail evictions, which can prove expensive. Another issue is the rehabilitation of mobile homes on their premises abandoned by former tenants, the ownership of which has reverted or fallen to them. Dilapidated homes represent potential liability to landlords, they say. A factor to be considered is the relative frequency or ratio between what mobile home owners consider to be “good” tenants and “bad tenants.
In addition, the landlords and their advocates say, the value of real estate has escalated so precipitously in recent years and the regulations with regard to density on residential projects has been so relaxed that those who own mobile home parks stand to make a tremendous profit by simply shuttering their mobile home parks and either developing the property as single-family or multifamily homes themselves or selling the property to a development company with that intent. This justifies, they say, raising leasing or rental rates on mobile home space beyond the 3 percent increase per year.
At any rate, the mobile home park owners and their support network insist, whether rent control is constitutional or not, there is no requirement that a city engage in rent control efforts and cities are free to let the market control what is to be paid for leasing space in a mobile home park.
Whatever financial hardships the owners of the mobile home parks are enduring pale in comparison to what those who are living in those parks, who are in large measure senior citizens living on fixed incomes of families living at or near the poverty level and therefore among the City of Gracious Living’s most vulnerable residents, there advocates say. There was no justification for the way in which the city council blindsided them by withdrawing the rent protection previous city fathers felt was called for. The fashion in which the city council acted in May and June of 2025 lacked transparency, they maintain, and was a betrayal of the mobile home residents who had counted upon city officials to not only be open about how they function but to provide everyone an opportunity to weigh in on city policy before it is formulated, altered or disregarded. There are some who went even further than that, saying they sensed in the manner in which the Mobilehome Rent Review ordinance that had been in existence at least since 1999 something venal, i.e., crooked, had taken place, that the mobile home park owners who had a lot of money riding on doing away with rent control would not be above “greasing” city officials, including the mayor and members of the city council, in other words providing them with bribes or kickbacks.
That was a compelling theory, given the secretiveness that had surrounded the action taken in May and June of 2025. As more and more mobile home residents became aware of what had occurred this spring and city officials reacted to the growing outrage among them, the distrust of City Hall deepened and city officials found themselves best with a credibility gap.
In the face of the dismay over the elimination of the Mobilehome Rent Review ordinance, the council sought to placate the 2.81 percent of the city’s 79,040 residents who live in mobile homes by proposing to revisit the concept of the Upland City Code incorporating a mobile home rent control provision.
In placing the proposed replacement ordinance on the May 11, 2026 city council meeting agenda, City Manager Michael Blay had Development Services Director Dahlquest and Housing Manager Diane Cotto prepare a staff report with regard to a set of options of what the new ordinance should consist of as it considered resurrecting the element of the city code jettisoned last year.
In the report, Dahlquest and Cotto stated, “The proposed action supports the city’s goal of responsive and transparent governance by establishing a fair and balanced framework that protects mobilehome residents from unreasonable rent increases; ensures mobilehome park owners receive a fair and reasonable return; and establishes a clear, enforceable and workable process for rent adjustments and dispute resolution.”
Under the subject heading of “Issues and Analysis, Dahlquest and Cotto stated, “The elimination of the city’s Mobilehome Rent Stabilization Ordinance was part of a broader update last year to the city’s municipal code. The previous ordinance contained several outdated and unworkable provisions, including limitations that did not align with State of California timelines, current economic conditions, and processes that could not be effectively implemented.”
At least a handful of the city’s mobile home residents were suspicious. Dahlquest’s and Cotto’s emphasis on “transparent governance” was at a variance with the way the city had hidden the mobile home rent survey ordinance the previous year.
In framing the background for the action to be taken, Dahlquest and Cotto engaged in a slight and subtle rewriting of history.
At the very least, Dahlquest and Cotto were implying with the language “broader update” that a replacement to what had been removed last year was intended all along. That appears doubtful, at best. The secretiveness with which the mobile home rent increase limitation had been removed, followed by more than eight months during which the issue was entirely ignored suggests that the city fathers had orchestrated in silence or virtual silence the disposal of the Mobilehome Rent Review ordinance in a very purposeful way, and were testing to see if and how the mobile home residents and the population in general was going to react. The implication was that if there was no reaction or minimal reaction without a substantial show of outrage or protest, the “update” of the Upland Municipal Code with regard to mobile homes and the rent those who live in them paid would never take place.
As the council was taking up the matter at the May 11, 2026 meeting, City Manager Michael Blay fell on his sword in an effort to protect the mayor and city council from the wrath of the public and stem inquiries on the part of some of the city’s residents that might lead to revelations with regard to the mayor’s and some or perhaps even all of the council members’ connections to the ownership of the mobile home parks. Just as Mayor Velto was about to open the hearing for public comment, Blay said, “Mayor, prior to opening to public speaking, I’d just like to make a brief statement about how we got here on this. On May 27, 2025, as part of the annual omnibus municipal ordinance clean-up effort, which we do each year, Chapter 658 was repealed in its entirety. This 40-year-old ordinance was removed because there were significant gaps that could not be effectively implemented and were at odds with state law timelines. Other factors included an HOA [homeowners association] requirement for each mobile home park, forms and procedures that were never created or approved and an arbitration process without an identified provider or established fees. I did a poor job of informing the council of all of the elements of this rescinded ordinance. The elements included a provision for rent control that had been in place for 40 years. I failed to provide you with a red-lined version of this ordinance text being eliminated, so your vote back then to rescind the ordinance was based on incomplete information and that’s my fault. I’m responsible for the situation we’re in tonight and, as a result, staff has brought forth options for the city council to consider.”
While some might have been misled by what Blay said, the more astute, particularly those who recognized that the city council had taken up the matter because Mayor Velto and the council were at that point reacting to the anger of a cross section of their constituents and had purposely done nothing for close to a year to “update” the portions of the Upland Municipal Code they had altered nearly 12 months earlier, they immediately understood that the city manager was covering for the city council.
Fourteen people spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting, participated During public comment, a resident identified only as Nicholas said, “Upland made a promise to these residents of these mobile home parks. They believed that promise meant something. They believed Upland understood the unique reality of mobile home ownership. The promise was removed in a way that ordinary citizens could not reasonably have known about, organized around or come here to challenge before the damage done.”
Brian Bender, the general manager of El Dorado Mobile Home Park, told the city council, “For 40 years we have operated under the prior rent control ordinance, absorbing 89 percent of CPI increase while our costs outpace that cap every year. Our average space rent today is $840. In the last 15 years, we have seen a 350 percent increase in our liability insurance costs. Our revenues have not kept pace. We are responsible for every inch of utility infrastructure within the 30 acres of the mobile home park, including 2.5 miles of streets, every electric line, water line, gas line from the master meter to each of the homes. The park was built in 1972. That infrastructure is aging. We are already at electrical capacity and cannot safely handle EV [electrical vehicle] charging or the proposed elimination of natural gas appliances from the State if California. We simply cannot afford these upgrades.”
Bender said the mobile home park operators could not abide by the city forcing them to continue to rent space at rates that does not keep up with the rate of inflation. Anticipating that the park owners would be permitted to up the rental charge on sold coaches in accordance with market rates, Bender said, the owners would still be losing money for years to come, comparative to what they could do with the property if it were used for other purposes.
“Eight percent of homes turnover [i.e., are sold] each year,” Bender said. “Even with resetting each each sold home being returned to a market rate, it will take over ten years to reach a sustainable base.”

Janice Arcuri and a woman identified only as Cindy called upon the city council to restore the ordinance to what it had been prior to July 2025.
David Podley, who said he had an interest in El Dorado Mobile Home Park, SAID, “The ability to provide phenomenal service and phenomenal quality of life… unfortunately… has been thwarted to some extent by the rent control situation we’ve had for the last 40 years. Many of our costs in the last 15 years alone at the park have gone up by over 300 percent. In the same time period, rents have gone up total by about 42 percent. That gap of over 250 percent is being borne by the owners of the park. The challenge the park has is costs are going up.” Podley called upon the council, in framing the new ordinance, to give park owners the ability to adjust rental rates upward when residents leave.
Darlene Jackovich told the council, “I understand market values. I understand the need for profit. That is the driving force of our society. But there is something to be said for those of us whose place in life does not allow us to keep up with the market values, those who put their years in building and developing the society and are now living on a fixed income and cannot keep up with the demands of the market. Please do not disregard us. We did our part when we were younger, when we were your age. Now, we need your help and your protection. She said the withdrawal of the ordinance was having a “devastating effect. Protect the many who are in need and not just the few who want more.”
Greg O’Hagen, who represents the management of Upland Meadows Mobile Home Park, offered his view that if the city is to readopt a mobile home rent control ordinance, it needs to revise it from what it was and give park owners absolute freedom to increase the rent on the space for sold homes far beyond the 7 percent limitation. “Managing mobile home parks is similar to running a small city,” O’Hagen said. “We must maintain all of the community’s infrastructure, all of the underground utility lines, all of the roads, all of the common areas. [Maintaining infrastructure] is costly, it’s ongoing and it is essential. I ask you: could the city maintain its own infrastructure just on 80 percent of its own revenue? That’s what the existing [i.e., previous] ordinance asks us to do. For these communities to remain viable and sustainable long term, the ordinance [them] governing must also evolve over time. The revised ordinance before you tonight achieves that balance.”
If the city imposed an ordinance that was financially onerous to the mobile home park owners, the mobile home parks will be sold to developers, leaving the residents of the parks without a place for their coaches, O’Hagen said.
During the discussion among the council members with regard to the ordinance, Second District Councilman Breitling after reflecting an understanding that the city’s current mobile home park residents wanted and needed annual limitations on their rent escalation, fixated again and again on the impact a redraft of the ordinance would have going forward, as if he were seeking from those present concern for future residents of the mobile home parks. Despite his efforts, no one articulated such a concern.
First District Councilwoman Shannon Maust evinced direct concern about the redraft option which allowed for the unlimited increase on the rent to be charged to future mobile home park residents, i.e., those who purchase a mobile home from an existing tenant or the mobile home park ownership. She noted the enthusiasm of those in the gallery for the council’s seeming embrasure of the revamped version of the ordinance which did away with the limitation on the initial escalation of rent to be charged on purchasers of coaches. She informed them that a close reading of that version would have implications for the current mobile park residents in that it might impact their ability to sell their coaches or the price they might get for them.
Maust made a motion to simply restore the previous version of the ordinance as it pertains to mobile home parks, mobile home residency and mobile home rents. Further discussion ensued before that motion was seconded, during which Mayor Velto made a substitute motion, seconded by Fourth District Councilman Rudy Zuniga, which which under Roberts Rules of Order must be voted upon prior to a revisiting of the original motion. Velto’s substitute motion was to restore the previous ordinance with a cut-out in which the unlimited escalation of rent on incoming residents can be imposed upon them after their purchase of an existing coach or the location of a new coach into a space vacancy. The gallery, which appeared to be occupied in large measure by current mobile home park residents, was positively disposed toward the substitute motion. Before the vote took place, Maust stated that she would be voting against it because she was hopeful it would fail, at which point she could revive her motion to reinstate the ordinance as it previously existed in its entirety.
Velto’s substitute motion passed on a 3-to-2 vote, with Velto, Zuniga and Third District Councilman Carlos Garcia prevailing and Maust and Breitling dissenting.
Former Second District Councilwoman Janice Elliott, acutely conscious of the manner in which the rental protection provision was cut out of the city code last year, has filed a public records act request with the city seeking
all written communication and phone log information spanning the time between May 1, 2023 up to May 13, 2026 pertaining to all mobile home issues or that relating to the city council’s action to rescind the mobile home ordinance in 2025 and to revive it in 2026, involving City of Upland employees, agents, attorneys, or contractors and all owners, property managers, employees, attorneys, or agents of the six mobile home parks located in Upland.
Elliot’s request also sought any analysis by the city attorney or any city employee of the impact of the ordinance as proposed and voted upon at the May 11, 2026 meeting as well as any analysis showing a comparison of the current provisions of the proposed ordinance and the “mobilehome rent review” ordinance that was previously in place until it was suspended or ended by the council’s action in May and June 2025.

What was perhaps the chance spotting of an operation by a sophisticated gang of domestic and international criminals specializing in the theft of cargo from freight trains resulted in three members of a team consisting of some dozen-and-a-quarter thieves being taken into custody in Devore on May 5.
Around 11 a.m. on Tuesday May 5 the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department received a call reporting that roughly 15 people had been observed riding on a Burlington Northern Santa Fe cargo train on the tracks near Glen Helen Parkway and Cajon Boulevard.
It is not known whether the report was from a citizen who by chance spotted what appeared to be an anomaly or whether an individual hired by one of the railroad companies to keep a watch on the trains transiting that stretch of the rail line descending into San Bernardino Valley from the High Desert phoned the warning in.
Over the last eight to ten months, an intensified crackdown on railroad cargo theft has been pursued by a multitude of agencies and entities, including the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad Police as well as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
According to the Association of American Railroads, “In recent years, organized criminal groups have increasingly targeted the nation’s railroads using sophisticated tactics and technology to commit cargo theft.”
In Southern California in particular, investigators have learned that the perpetrators have previously succeeded because they had inside information about railroad company operations.
Railroad industry sources and law enforcement professionals report that a substantial amount of railroad cargo theft takes place as a consequence so-called “inside jobs,” that is, with the assistance of those who work with the railroads themselves or as part of the rail infrastructure and support network. Individual linked to cargo theft rings who have specific knowledge of the placing and timing of the shipment by rail of high-value goods is a common vulnerability and a major factor in the success of criminals who target rail cars for theft. Railroad police, the sheriff’s department, the San Bernardino Police Department, the Colton Police Department, the Rialto Police Department and the FBI have information that organized crime is employing individuals who assume relatively low-ranking and even temporary positions with rail companies or at rail terminals and rail yards to obtain information about what goods are being transported on which trains and in specific rail cars, together with information about when and where the trains are to remain stationary for an extended period.
Another vulnerability consists of spots where moving trains must slow considerably at curves or bends in the rail line, as is the case at the bottom of the slope descending from the Cajon Pass near Devore. Trains are obliged to decelerate to navigate the sharp, sweeping curve there, as taking the turn at too high of a speed poses a severe tipping hazard for heavy, multi-platform freight cars. Both the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company and the Union Pacific Railroad Company enforce impose strict speed reductions for engineers driving trains at that location. This affords those on foot determined to jump on to a passing train an opportunity to do so, albeit with a certain degree of difficulty and some danger. Once on the trains, the thieves can break locks and seals on individual cars to gain entry to them and liberate their contents.
The highgraded investigations have revealed a substantial international component among the perpetrators, and occasionally evidence that those involved in the rings have immediate or removed family members who have found work with the railroad companies, rail terminals or rail yards.
As a consequence of some of the known thieves being foreign citizens, many of them in the country illegally, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and its subdivision, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have become involved.
According to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, ‘The [May 5, 2026] incident location is a high crime area for train cargo theft.”
The deputies who had been dispatched to that location arrived after the thieves had jumped from the train at a spot where it is still obliged to move at a slower speed but before they had left the area. Moments later a vehicle moving at a high rate of speed drove past them. Two deputies in separate vehicles took off after those fleeing. The driver took evasive action and initially refused to pull over, but then stopped at the side of the 215 Freeway.
“Approximately ten subjects fled from the vehicle on foot,” according to the sheriff’s department.
Fernando Barrza, 19, of San Bernardino was quickly collared, and deputies also managed to overtake Rodrigo Luna Arredondo, 32, of San Bernardino. All but one of the others who had emerged from the vehicle scattered upon making it across the freeway, and were not caught.
Another of those fleeing, whose identity has not been released, “was struck by a vehicle while running across the freeway,” according to the department. The man survived, but was taken to a hospital, where as of earlier this week he last week he yet remains.
According the department items taken from the train were in the vehicle.
Barrza and Arredondo were booked on suspicion of possession of stolen property and criminal conspiracy.
Bail was set at a relatively low $30,000, a ploy to see if an effort to free the pair on bond will take place, whereupon investigators will be able to learn more about the ring.

Sheriff’s Department homicide detectives have come to the conclusion that an argument between two brothers nearly a generation apart in age resulted in fratricide Monday night in Hesperia.
While others in the 9200 block of Second Avenue in the City of Progress were experiencing a relatively quiet evening on the night of May 11 an argument between Talib Elisha Venegas, 30, and his 50-year-old brother, Adrian Clay Wrice broke out. The contretemps between the  two was punctuated by a gunshot at around 10:45 p.m.
A 9-1-1 call was made and when arriving sheriff’s deputies reached the location, they were directed to the 9269 address when they found Wrice suffering from a gunshot wound.
“Deputies immediately initiated lifesaving measures until medical personnel arrived, according to a sheriff’s department statement. “Wrice was airlifted to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center where he was pronounced deceased. Hesperia deputies conducted an initial investigation and identified the suspect as Talib Elisha Venegas, the brother of Wrice. Venegas fled the scene prior to the deputies’ arrival.”
Detectives with the sheriff’s department’s specialized investigation division’s homicide detail dispatched to the scene reached a preliminary determination that confirmed the deputies findings and an arrest warrant for Venegas was obtained
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, however, the department played what information it had close to the vest. Sheriff’s department spokeswoman Jenny Smith, without naming Venegas and without mentioning the use of a firearm, in an application of understatement, said “During an argument between the suspect and victim, the victim sustained a major injury.’
Smith described the victim as a man but was less specific about the suspect, leaving the impression that the department might be seeking a woman as the perpetrator.
Venegas was taken into custody about 10:40 a.m. Tuesday when he returned to 9269 2nd Avenue. He was booked on suspicion of murder, along with violating the terms of felony probation stemming from a prior conviction.
He is being held without bail pending a future bail hearing.
Both brothers had criminal records and neither was unacquainted with firearms.
Adrian Wrice has a criminal history dating back more than 25 years, which included felony convictions while he was living in Los Angeles County at 4621 Gleason Street in Los Angeles and another location in Venice. Wrice removed himself from Los Angeles County to San Bernardino County some 12 years ago, at which time he attempted to make a go of it with his trucking company, known as ACW Logistics. Over the last ten years, he was arrested on October 16, 2016 for being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was arrested on September 29, 2016 on a charge of inflicting corporal injury on a spouse or cohabitant. He was arrested on April 11, 2017 for making threats of violence. On December 10, 2018, his parole officer took note of what was suspected to be a violation of his probation. On February 7, 2019, he was arrested for a probation violation. On July 12, 2019, September 12, 2019 and again on December 3, 2019, the probation department was involved in investigating or reviewing Wrice’s potential violation of probation. On October 2, 2022, he was considered to be a fugitive from justice. On March 2, 2024, he was arrested for being in possession of a controlled substance for sale.
In 2018, Wrice was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm and of inflicting corporal punishment on a spouse with regard to the 2016 cases.
In 2019, Wrice was convicted of a probation violation.
Wrice’s younger brother, now his suspected killer, was convicted in 2024 of buying/receiving stolen property. At the time of his arrest, he was also charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. That charge was vacated when he pleaded guilty to the receiving stolen property charge. In 2025, he was convicted of violation of probation. In 2021, Venegas, whose full name is Talib Elijah Venegas, was convicted of possession of drugs. In 2019, he was convicted of felony violation of parole. In 2016, he was convicted of possession of metal knuckles. In 2014, he was convicted of discharge of a firearm with gross negligence.
Venegas was pursuing a carreer as a rapper, having composed content that typically dwelt on or celebrated a criminal lifestyle, put into a rhyming couplets and delivered in his own inimitable flow, candence and tone.

By Richard Hernandez and Mark Gutglueck
The Mexican Consulate in San Bernardino is among seven of the 53 Mexican consulates throughout the United States which are being considered for forced closure by the U.S State Department, the Sentinel has learned.
The San Bernardino consulate is contained on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s list of facilities being considered for closure based on a multitude of factors, extending to what U.S. Government officials claim is the increase in tension and danger stemming from the Mexican government’s discontinuation of cooperation and withdrawal of support relating to FBI, CIA and DEA operations in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua last month, suspicions that personnel with the San Bernardino Mexican consulate, along with consular officials elsewhere, are participating in a Mexican Government-sponsored program to interrupt U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations to round up undocumented Mexican National aliens in California and what is said to be emerging evidence that elements of the Mexican Government and the administration of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, including consular officials assigned to Southern California, are either involved directly in or are offering shelter to Mexican nationals involved in both narcotics and illegal arms trafficking.
The U.S. State Department has made no official confirmation of any contemplated change in the status quo of what is numerically the largest contingent of a single country’s consulates in the United States. Nevertheless, the State Department acknowledges a review of both the activity at and surrounding several of the most heavily-used consulates in the country is taking place. While the provision of documentation, legal assistance, travel guidance and visitation permit application completion services is a routine function at consulates of all nations, the Trump Administrations intensification of immigration enforcement last year triggered the creation of a bevy of internet-based and cellular-system communication device programs including real-time input and algorithm-driven programs to track or predict the location and presence of U.S. federal agents, most particularly the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as they engage in undocumented migrant roundups preparatory toward deporting or expelling those taken into custody from the country. The Trump Administration considers those programs – such as the Panic Button app or Allert Button app – along with several crowdsourcing platforms such as ICEBlock, People Over Papers and ResistMap, to be illegal, as in the words of former Attorney General Pamela Bondi “an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed” which “put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs” and is thereby a violation of 18 U.S. Code § 115, which prohibits threatening, harming or assisting in the harming of, federal employees and agents.
In 2025, when Operation Alta California, the Trump Administration’s effort to find, detain, arrest, process, formally charge and ultimately deport as many of the more than 2.2 million illegal aliens in California, the use of the Panic Button, Alert Button, ICEBlock, People Over Papers and ResistMap apps, which to greater or lesser degrees were coordinated with personnel at the San Bernardino Mexican Consulate tremendously complicated that undertaking. The Trump Administration [cycled] through multiple strategies in seeking to deal with or otherwise handle the obstruction and resistance to the detention/deportation program, many of which resulted in adverse publicity. Those included targeting businesses known to employ unskilled labor and/or foreign workers, locations where foreigners were known to congregate, stopping individuals on the basis of their conversing in a foreign language, making surprise sweeps, into area’s heavily populated by Latinos, engaging in roving operations, the use of California National Guard Troops to provide operational security in and around areas of operation, and then, when California Governor Gavin Newsom objected to the use of the National Guard, vectoring over 700 Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms to specific locations in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties to “protect federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel took up the cause of immigrants being detained and arrested byn the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which resulted in rulings in Federal Court in the Central District of California subsequently upheld by a panel with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that federal officials were engaged in a “racist deportation scheme,” by it use of those tactics.
The Trump Administration not only suffered adverse publicity as a consequence of the use of those tactics, but was forced to greatly de-intensify the effort to enforce immigration law in California for several months untilthe U.S. Supreme Court, essentially, signaled that federal agents working in Southern California, where 71 percent of the illegal immigrants originated in Latin America, were not engaging in discriminatory behavior by considering the speaking of Spanish to be a criterion distinguishing undocumented aliens from the native population or concentrating their patrols in or around businesses which have a demonstrated prior history of employing or attracting individuals in the country illegally.
This interruption of the immigration enforcement program, a centerpiece of the Second Trump Administration, left the federal officials convinced that the Mexican Government, in particular certain elements of it such as personnel functioning out of the San Bernardino Mexican Consulate were engaged in activity both illegal and contrary to the interest of the United States.
Federal law enforcement had also ascertained that there were Mexican Nationals in the United States involved in drug trafficking, human trafficking and the transit of other contraband, including firearms and armament who had been assisted by personnel working out of the San Bernardino Mexican Consulate in avoiding apprehension by both Mexican law enforcement and U.S. federal agencies.
Despite those concerns, there was resolve to avoid an international incident over relatively minor considerations and any communication regarding those issues between U.S. officials and the Mexican Government was handled quietly between the State Department and the Mexican diplomatic corps.
In April, however, events overtook both countries when what might or might not have been a traffic mishap claimed the lives of two CIA officers who were on an assignment in Mexico to not only track Mexican drug cartel activity but actively engage in stemming it.
On April 17 and April 18, a huge counternarcotic operation into Mexico’s infamous Golden Triangle targeting a series of expansive and sophisticated methamphetamine labs in the area in and surrounding the small village of El Pinal, near Chihuahua’s border with the state of Sinaloa took place. The El Pinal District is host to extensive assets currently or once controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel, formerly headed by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, which consist of marijuana and opium poppy farms, airstrips to export drugs out of the region or accommodate flights coming in from Colombia and Ecuador carrying cocaine, as well as state-of-the-art synthetic drug labs. The raids were led by the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency and reportedly involved several agencies of the Mexican federal government.
On April 19, an SUV with four passengers returning from the site of those raids veered off a tortuous dirt road in a remote corner of the Sierra Madre near the municipality of Morelos, plunging more 600 feet down into a rocky ravine. All four, who were clad in uniforms of the Chihuahua State Investigative Agency, were killed. They were Chihuahua State Investigation Agency Director Pedro Ramón Oseguera Cervantes, Chihuahua State Investigation Agency Detective were Genaro Méndez Montes and Americans John Dudley Black, 44, and Richard Leiter Johnston, 36.
Black and Johnson were CIA agents functioning under diplomatic cover with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.
The deaths of Black, Johnson, Cervantes and Montes brought what was for many unwanted attention to the raids that had taken place on April 17 and 18 and even worse, the revelation that the U.S. Government was involved. Over the next 24 to 48 hours a litany of statements, ones that were substantially true, incomplete, untrue, half-true, quarter-true and complete fabrications emanated from all involved.
President Sheinbaum in an initial statement offering condolences to the families of the four dead men seemed to indicate she knew about the CIA’s involvement. Shortly thereafter, she reversed herself, stating that the Mexican federal government had not participated in the raids, had no prior knowledge about them or that they were to take place and therefore was kept in the dark about U.S. Government or CIA involvement in operations on Mexican soil. She asserted she had not been aware that the U.S. Government was involved in either the intelligence gathering that preceded the operations around El Pinal or their planning.
The leaders of several Mexican federal agencies or departments were reluctant or unwilling to acknowledge that they had any part in the raid. The Army was uninvolved, its command insisted when news of the raids first broke, while the Mexican Navy admitted some of its personnel had been present.
Sheinbaum indicated the raids were carried out under sole by the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency and at the discretion/direction of Chihuahua State Attorney General César Jáuregui Moreno.
There was contradictory information with regard to the roles of Black and Johnson. It was suggested rather than stated that they were there merely as observers. One story that circulated was that Black and Johnson had been on hand to offer guidance and training in the use of drones. The story continued to change, even with regard to the terms of their presence in Mexico. It was not true that both, it was said, were functioning under diplomatic cover. According to the Mexican Ministry of Security, of the agents indeed had come to Mexico City utilizing a diplomatic passport, but the other had entered Mexico as a tourist.
Sheinbaum acknowledged after three days that that federal forces were involved after several of her underlings within the Mexican Government’s executive branch made statement to the effect that they had not been informed and therefore had not told the president that Mexico’s federal government was directly involved or that those agencies and departments that had taken place in the operation had cooperated with the U.S. government. It was at that point that the Mexican Army’s participation in the raids was acknowledged.
Still, Sheinbaum’s position was that the operation was largely an undertaking masterminded by Chihuahua State Attorney General Moreno and the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency.
All of this played out against a backdrop of fierce partisan rivalry between Sheinbaum’s leftist Morena Party, which at present is the ruling bloc dominating Mexico at the national level, and the center-right National Action Party, which holds sway in Chihuahua. It was under the Morena Party that, in years past, the Sinaloa Cartel flourished.
Indeed, information obtained by the U.S. Justice Department in the aftermath of the 2016 arrest of Joaquín Guzmán – El Chapo – in Los Mochis, Sinoloa and his 2017 extradition to the Unitied States where he was convicted in 2019 and is now incarcerated at the maximum security federal prison in Fremont County, Colorado, information obtained has resulted in the indictment of ten current and former Mexican officials, including Rubén Rocha Moya, the governor of Sinoloa. Moya, like Sheinbaum and most of those indicted in the United States, are members of the Morena bloc. At the same time, Chihuahua, at least at present, is one of the few National Action Party bastions in the country.
The indictment of Moya and the nine other Mexican officials, which was sought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and presented to a down grand jury, was unsealed on April 29, 2026. Named in the indictment, in addition to Moya was a Mexican senator/former Sinaloa Secretary General Enrique Inzunza Cazarez, Former Secretary of Administration and Finance for Sinaloa Enrique Diaz Vega, Sinaloa Deputy Attorney General Damaso Castro Zaavedra, the former chief investigator for the Sinaloa State Attorney General’s Office Alberto Jorge “Cholo” Contrera Nunez, the former chief investigator for the Sinaloa State Attorney General’s Office Marco Antonio Almaza Aviles, Former Deputy Director of the Sinaloa State Police Jose Antonio “Tornado” Dionisio Hipolito, Former Secretary of Public Security for Sinaloa Gerardo Merida Sanchez, Culiacan Mayor Juan de Dios Gamez Mendivil and former Culiacan Municipal Police Commander Juan “Juanito” Valenzuela Millan.
While no realistic evidence exists to incriminate Sheinbaum herself in the cartel activity for which the indictments in the United States were handed down, there is indication – strong indication – that cartel money has fueled the successful election campaigns of Morena Party candidates who proceeded Sheinbaum. She has resisted American suggestions that the Morena Party is riddled with corruption and she is even more adamant in maintaining that the Mexican government will oppose any efforts at extradition of Mexican government officials to the United States to stand trial. What the United States is doing by indicting those officials, Sheinbaum and her political aides have said, is interfering in Mexico’s internal affairs. Sheinbaum has issued an executive order that Mexican federal authorities discontinue cooperation with FBI, CIA and DEA operatives known to be function in Mexico. It appears that Chihuahua State officials and National Action Party-affiliated politicians in
Chihuahua and elsewhere the Morena Party is not dominant do not consider themselves bound by Sheinbaum’s order.
Sheinbaum’s remarks to the effect that the United States is interfering in Mexico’s domestic affairs mirror what the United States officials in the Trump Administration have opined about activity emanating from Mexican consulates on American soil, such as the Mexican consulate in San Bernardino, interfering with America’s sovereignty.
The Trump Administration, convinced the conspiracy to import narcotics, possession of machine guns and destructive devices and conspiracy to possess machineguns and destructive devices charges and accusation contained in the indictment against
Moya, Cazarez, Vega, Zaavedra, Nunez, Aviles, Hipolito, Sanchez and Millan as enumerated by United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton and assistant U.S. attorneys Jane Y. Chong, Sarah L. Kushner, and David J. Robles merit being heard in a court of law. Moya’s and Sheinbaum’s characterization of the indictments as an attempt to subvert Mexico’s sovereignty constitute, they believe, the international incident that overrides the custom of abiding by diplomatic courtesy which has heretofore prevented the State Department from acting to close the San Bernardino Mexican Consulate and the six other consulates from which the Trump Administration has grounds to believe individuals engaged in serious criminal enterprises are operating.

San Bernardino County’s current crop of governmental decision-makers entrusted with overseeing transportation issues have made what appears to be an historic commitment to suspend the potential for extending the Los Angeles County light rail system eastward for what is likely to be at least two generations.
While urban planners working from the latest and most complete available data consider electric-powered dual track high-passenger-capacity light rail systems to represent the soundest bet to alleviate commuter gridlock that has been the bane of Southern California life since the 1960s, local transit officials, oriented to passenger rail travel by means of the long-existent and sparsely used MetroRail system have become adamantly resistant to committing future county residents to the option of traveling by train. Adding to that determination is the initial expense of securing the right-of-way for and building the two-track system, previous San Bernardino County failure to get on board with Los Angeles County’s more enthusiastic embrasure of the light rail system and the resultant unwillingness to trust San Bernardino County officials with the funding authority to bring a light rail project to fruition in their jurisdiction.
In the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and into the 1950s rail travel in Southern California was a reality, as the Red Car Line stretched from Santa Monica next to the Pacific Ocean on the west to Redlands and Mentone in the east. The Red Car Line featured work stations with desks and typewriters for those with clerical jobs to stay abreast of their daily tasks while they were traveling to work as well as a post office to dispatch their completed assignments to their intended destinations. In the 1950s, however, the advance of the automobile culture in America knelled the demise of the Red Line in Los Angeles and the greater Los Angeles Area as was the case with rail commuting systems in more than a dozen major metropolitan areas throughout the country.
The first incarnation of the National Highway System, which included the Interstate 10 Freeway, was completed during the Eisenhower Administration. The 10 Freeway, which crossed into California from Arizona and ran through Riverside county into San Bernardino County and through Los Angeles County all the way to its terminus in Santa Monica became the mainstay for those commuting westward to work through the heart of Southern California in the morning and home at the end of the workday. Within ten years of its completion, however, it became jammed during both the morning and evening rush hours on weekdays. Continue reading →

By Mark Gutglueck
Yaoning “Mike” Sun, the Chino Hills man who was arrested by the FBI in December 2024 on charges that he acted as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China, has implicated Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang in his acknowledged efforts of seeking to influence governmental activity and decision-making at several levels within the United States and in Southern California, the Sentinel is reliably informed.
As a consequence of information Sun provided to the FBI, both prior to and after entering a guilty plea in October 2025 and his sentencing to four years in prison on February 9, 2026, Mayor Wang found herself boxed in on all sides and herself provided federal investigators with specific information with regard to how an espionage, influence and propaganda operation being carried out by agents of the Chinese government was operating, the Sentinel has learned.
While being interrogated by the FBI, Wang acknowledged she was clandestinely working with Sun, to whom she was at one time engaged to be married, in pursuing the interests of the Chinese government which were inimical to those of the United States.
Both Sun and Wang had associations with others in the United States who were functioning at the behest of and in coordination with the People’s Republic of China in disseminating propaganda placed before Americans in social media and which was published or broadcasted in the press/traditional media outlets, as well as participating in efforts to harm those dissenting from Chinese Communist rule who were residing in the United States.
Wang is the owner of the single family home in Chino Hills where Sun resided and is listed on documents filed with the California Secretary of State’s office’s corporate licensing division as the owner of U.S. News Center, of which Sun was the director. Articles now known to have been written by Chinese government officials which contradicted or greatly downplayed reports of internal repression of individuals or groups in China based on their ethnicity, religion or ideology along with unfair trade practices were published by the U.S. News Center or placed with American newspapers through the U.S. News Center. Continue reading →

It appears that the U.S. Attorney’s Office is going to dismiss all criminal charges it previously filed against an Ontario man, Carlos Jimenez, growing out of an encounter he had with a federal agent, Eusebio Ortiz, on October 30, 2025.
In that incident, Ortiz shot Jimenez in the upper back after Ortiz claimed Jimenez angled his vehicle at him and attempted to run him and other federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers down as they were preparing to carry out a raid on a South Ontario residence in which suspected undocumented immigrants were residing.
Jimenez, in whose shoulder a bullet is yet lodged because of medical complication, had been charged with felony assault on a federal officer. The U.S. Attorney’s Office, which had reflexively filed the criminal charges against Jimenez in the immediate aftermath of the confrontation, in keeping with an internal Department of Homeland Security review of the incident, has concluded that Ortiz overreacted to Jimenez’s presence and exchange with the federal agents as the task force they were a part of were assembling preparatory to the morning surprise raid.
The dismissal of the case with prejudice against Jimenez will be finalized on October 31, 2026, one year and a day following the incident in question and without any requirement that Jimenez withdraw or dismiss the $35 million lawsuit he has filed against the federal government over his shooting. The dismissal of the criminal charges with prejudice means that the criminal case against Jimenez cannot be subsequently refiled or revived.
Jimenez, 24, had left the trailer in which he resides within the Country Meadows Mobile Home Park, located at 1855 East Riverside Drive, at 6:30 a.m. on Thursday October 30 to make the drive to his Baldwin Park workplace. Continue reading →