The Brief

After 12 crashes that have resulted in injuries, property damage and two fatalities, Caltrans has started construction work to address safety concerns at an intersection in Norwalk where the 105 Freeway ends at Studebaker Road.

L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn called the intersection a “crash magnet” in a letter to the California State Transportation Agency because of the freeway’s abrupt end.

“The medical building that used to operate on the other side of the road has since been closed due to the number of times it was struck by vehicles,” Hahn wrote in the letter.

She asked the state to prioritize the intersection for future funding.

“The end of this freeway has been badly designed and will probably lead to more fatalities unless corrected,” Hahn wrote.

Caltrans has started a project to install rumble strips on the exit ramp, a safety feature that vibrates vehicles when they cross them. A flashing signal on top of “End of Freeway” signs, “KEEP CLEAR” pavement markings, and a crosswalk at the signal at the intersection will also be installed.

“Caltrans is also in the process of beginning a separate project that would enhance intersection lighting,” the statement continued.

A Caltrans spokesperson told LAist that officials from the state Transportation Department met with city officials last August to begin talks about addressing the dangers at that intersection. The transportation agency has since had regular meetings with the city, as recently as last week.

A 21-foot-tall mirrored metal bust of renowned director David Lynch has popped up in front of a new apartment complex in Santa Monica.

The animated sculpture is by David Černý, a Czech artist who told LAist he was inspired by Lynch’s work and the Eraserhead director’s connection to Prague.

About the bust

The piece is divided into dozens of horizontal metal parts that rotate and realign from Lynch’s likeness into more abstract, seemingly randomized designs.

It sits on a chrome pedestal in front of the 1550 Lincoln apartments, near the intersection of Lincoln Boulevard and Colorado Avenue. The bust is similar to another one of Černý’s popular projects, a kinetic sculpture of writer Franz Kafka that’s been displayed in a public square in Prague since 2014.

Černý said the apartment developers, NMS Properties, liked his Prague piece and asked him to do another version in Santa Monica about seven years ago, and he wanted to depict someone from Hollywood and film.

“I realized that my probably most adored film director was David Lynch, and not only because of his movies,” he said.

Černý was drawn to Lynch’s close connection with his hometown of Prague, he said, including the director’s relationship with the The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, which recorded scores for Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

“Then I find out that there is a picture of him, with the portrait of Franz Kafka, and he was saying that in this interview that if he would have a chance to pick his brother, that would be Franz Kafka,” Černý said.

That was when he knew Lynch was the right choice, he said. And while they may not be biological brothers, they could now be considered siblings in stainless steel.

How it got here

Santa Monica requires private developers to install on-site public art that’s equal to at least 2% of the average square foot cost of construction, which the Lynch sculpture satisfied.

But not everyone was on board about having a giant metal face towering over the sidewalk.

When the project went before the Santa Monica Arts Commission in November 2017 for their final approval, there was discussion if the sculpture should represent a woman instead, according to the meeting minutes.

Commissioner Phil Brock also asked Černý if he would reconsider the form, but that didn’t go anywhere. Brock and Commissioner Laurie Yehia ended up voting against the project.

Černý said once he got the city's greenlight, he also wanted to make sure his inspiration approved of the idea.

“After like one month waiting, we finally get the letter,” he said. “Well, yeah, David [Lynch] agreed, like no problem with that. I was really glad.”

It took Černý almost two years to construct the piece, and he said Lynch “really likes it.” The artist is hoping to visit it again in person for an official unveiling sometime this year.

“I almost end up being a filmmaker instead of being a sculptor,” Černý said. “So, my admiration towards him is also very professional.”

California’s snowpack is above average, officials confirmed Tuesday, and that’s good news for the water supply for millions of homes and the state’s massive economy, including agriculture.

State officials said the snowpack at an official measuring spot south of Lake Tahoe was 5 feet, 4 inches deep, which is 113% above the average for past years — with 2023 being an exception.

“That snowpack will turn into water to provide drinking water for upwards of 40 million Californians, the lifeblood of our agriculture sector and our economy,” said California’s Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot.

In April of last year, the snowpack was nearly twice as deep. But Crowfoot warned against seeing recent healthy snowpacks as a trend.

How we got here

“The water year that ended just 16 months ago ended the driest three-year period in the state's history. We had 6 million Californians under water rationing and we were planning for a whole lot more in the preceding year,” he said.

Months later, atmospheric rivers dumped a lot of rain. Then in February, officials warned that our snowpack may not reach expected levels.

California officials use the peak snow measurement, when the snowpack is usually the deepest before it starts to melt in the spring, to underline various water management strategies they say will soften the blow of our weather whiplash.

What’s in the California water plan

California’s water plan is updated every five years. The most recent plan was released on Tuesday and includes input from environmental, business, tribal, and local governments.

“We are not victims of fate,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom at the snowpack measurement site. “We recognize the world we're living in, we recognize the trend lines into the future, and we're navigating them."

He pointed to state strategies to improve water management, be it through the natural environment like watersheds, or spending $9 billion in the last year-and-a-half on infrastructure, such as dams.

Highlights from the plan:

• Infrastructure improvement needs to take into account natural watershed elements like rivers
• Increased fires from climate change are making water management more difficult
• Communication with state tribes is important to glean watershed knowledge and to hear how water management policy changes affect those nations

Newsom highlighted the massive Delta Conveyance Project, an ongoing project to capture more water in the river system between Sacramento and San Francisco.

What tribes can teach California about water management

Officials putting together the water plan also convened a tribal advisory committee to hear how ancestral water management knowledge can be used by the state’s agencies. Tribal members shared knowledge about how to use controlled burns and how to restore meadows.

According to the plan, tribes have been limited in the way they control and access water, which has constrained practices that are cultural, spiritual, and sustainable. The aim of including tribal input is to support their sovereignty, and socio-economic stability, officials said.

Los Angeles County officials are distributing 60,000 free cable gun locks in hopes that the devices will save lives.

“In 2022, more than 300 residents died by gun suicide and 510 residents died after being shot by someone with a gun,” Barbara Ferrer, director of the L.A. County Public Health Department, said at a Tuesday news conference in Downey.

The gun locks will initially be available this year at six county medical facilities, county authorities said. They are expected to be available later at L.A. County libraries, no questions asked.

Ferrer noted there are more than 400 million guns in the U.S., gun locks and other safety measures could be critical to reducing firearm-related violence.

The locks use a steel cable that is looped through the weapon to prevent it from firing.
Similar to a bike lock, it’s opened with a key.

“A woman who experiences domestic violence is five times more likely to be murdered by her abuser if they have access to a gun,” Ferrer said.

The 2023 mass shooting at a Monterrey Park dance studio that left 11 people dead and nine others injured put the spotlight back on local gun violence.

In L.A. County, a child is killed or injured by gun violence every 30 hours, often from guns left loaded and unlocked, Ferrer said. Many who survive suffer serious and lifelong injuries, including spinal cord damage, doctors say.

Rudy Nuñez was just 16 years old when he was shot in the neck, paralyzing him from the chest down. He now works with other gun violence survivors.

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Jackie Fortier/LAist

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In 1993, Rudy Nuñez was 16 when he was shot in the neck while in a car with his friend, paralyzing him from the chest down. He now works with other gun violence survivors.

“It means a lot to help people with spinal cord injury to show them life is not over, there’s still life after injury," Nuñez said. "Providing free gun locks and educating the community about gun safety will keep our families safe.”

Richard Serra died last Tuesday. In the last 50 years, he had become a giant in American and world art.

Southern Californians have plenty of opportunities to see a wide variety of his work because of his long relationship with regional arts institutions and philanthropists.

But first …

Things to know about Serra

He was proud to say that before he was an artist he’d worked at Bethlehem Steel while he was a freshman playing football at UC Berkeley.

“I came from a generation of artists that were blue collar,” Serra told me in 2006, during the unveiling of a sculpture in Costa Mesa.

“One of my closest friends is [composer] Phil Glass, he also worked steel mills. Another close friend of mine — a great sculptor named Carl Andre — he worked the railroad, Bob Morris worked the stockyard,” Serra said.

Serra wanted to be a painter during the time of abstract art and minimalism, the Western art movement that broke from depicting people, landscapes, or other natural images and sought a purification of the material used to make the art. “What you see is what you see,” minimalist artist Frank Stella said.

He worked with big slabs of steel

Serra worked a lot with various kinds of metal. In an early work, Serra made a list of dozens of verbs such as to roll, to crease, to fold and began doing that to metal, sometimes melting it and splashing it on gallery walls.

"Band" by Richard Serra on view at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

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photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

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In the last several decades, Serra mostly created pieces with 2-inch thick plates of COR-TEN steel, often 15 feet tall and 40 feet or longer. He preferred this kind of steel because over time it developed a patina of various shades of amber depending on the location of the piece.

His sculptures were muscular — and took a lot of muscle to move.

A target of the culture wars

In 1981 Serra unveiled a piece called "Tilted Arc," installed in the public plaza of a federal building in New York City. The national controversy that ensued in the next decade entangled office workers ticked off that their lunch walks were interrupted, as well as a federal judge and political conservatives who said Serra’s art was a waste of public money.

In the end, the piece was ripped out. Serra said he did not know where it ended up.

Serra’s signature sculptures dot Los Angeles

The public can see Serra’s work across Southern California, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA, Pasadena, and Costa Mesa.

Richard Serra during the proofing of his series "Rounds" in the Gemini artist studio, 1998

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Courtesy of The Getty

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If we could look through the knot-hole in the fence of the late billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad’s home in Los Angeles, we could see "No Problem," four 15-foot-tall conical sheets and predecessors to Serra’s Torqued Ellipses. The Broad has this nice picture of it.

In 1991 Serra installed a slope sculpture at the Gilbert Friesen residence in Los Angeles. It’s part of a series of work that used natural slopes in the land and juxtaposed slabs of steel with the drops in elevation some slight, some steep. It’s unclear if the Friesen sculpture is still there.

And if you see Disney Hall and have a Serra-déjà vu moment — there’s a connection. In the 1990s, Serra was trying to figure out how to bend his sheets of metal around two parallel ellipses while torquing those ellipses 90 degrees or more from each other. It was hard. He didn’t see it occur in nature. At the time, L.A. architect Frank Gehry was trying to solve a similar problem to create sheets of steel to cover buildings. A former aerospace engineer working for Gehry’s showed Serra a French computer program that allowed visualization of these kinds of shapes in 3-D. Gehry used the technology to design Disney Hall. Serra used it to create his most famous series, Torqued Ellipses.

Where to see more

Serra's work — sculpture and also print — is on display in many places across the Greater Los Angeles area.

Band| Los Angeles County Museum of Art

LACMA boasts that the 2006 sculpture that’s on display now at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA could be Serra’s greatest work. What do you think?

T.E.U.C.L.A.| UCLA

The title stands for Torqued Ellipse UCLA. It’s outdoors at the Broad Art Center at UCLA. It’s a smaller torqued ellipse and gives the viewer an opportunity to walk in and around and see that amber patina out in the real world and how it responds to drizzle, rain, and people leaving their marks on it.

Base Plate Deflection: In It, On It | Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena

One of the things that makes this piece interesting is that it’s from 1970, early in Serra’s career and the same year Serra had a solo show at the storied but now defunct Pasadena Art Museum. While so much of Serra’s work is vertical, this piece is horizontal but hints at a relationship with the monumentality of the Earth’s arc.

It’s located in the front part of the museum, to the right of the accessible ramp leading to the Norton Simon’s main entrance.

Connector | Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa

Remember the controversy when Serra created a commissioned sculpture for a plaza? Well, philanthropist Henry Segerstrom commissioned Serra to do the same. Serra took a different approach than Tilted Arc.

“I think what was needed here was not something horizontal, but something vertical that would collect people much like a Campanile in an Italian plaza,” Serra told LAist in 2006 at the unveiling.

Santa Fe Depot | Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

The 2004 sculpture is an example of Serra’s massive forged steel cubes. The train station’s arcs provide a nice allusion to arcs at a monastery where Serra installed similar pieces in 1985. It is unclear what’s going to happen to the San Diego pieces as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is selling the property the pieces sit on.

Notebook Drawings | Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Gemini G.E.L. has a series of eight etchings. They're only on view until April 5. If you miss that one, the Getty Center has a Serra drawing on display through July. The piece is part of a larger show of photographs and prints related to Gemini G.E.L. and its impact on the art world in L.A. and beyond.

The FBI has been conducting a criminal investigation into the Santa Ana Unified School District's agreements with several companies that provided weekly COVID-19 testing to students and staff during the pandemic, according to documents obtained by LAist.

The contract at the center of the FBI inquiry, for the 2021-2022 school year, was among the largest pandemic-era school testing contracts in the state. It was worth well over $100 million, according to an estimate given to independent investigators in a separate wide-ranging investigation, and LAist calculations. The testing was billed by the contractor directly to the federal government and private insurance companies.

Santa Ana Unified is the second-largest school district in Orange County, with about 44,000 students and 5,000 employees.

A federal subpoena reviewed by LAist targets records from the COVID-19 testing operation dating back to Aug. 1, 2021. The documents sought included communications, billing records and contracts with businesses owned by Todd Ament, and other businesses for which he served as a contact with the district, according to the subpoena and documents obtained by LAist from the district.

Ament was a key figure in a recent, wide-ranging government corruption scandal in Anaheim.

He was a major player in Anaheim politics who led the city's chamber of commerce before he was indicted on a variety of corruption charges and pleaded guilty to several counts of fraud in 2022.

In federal wiretaps conducted as part of that previous investigation, Ament described himself as part of a “cabal” of elected officials, political consultants, and business leaders that worked covertly to influence Anaheim politics. An FBI investigator described him in an affidavit as a “ringleader” of the group.

Three months before the Santa Ana Unified school board approved a no-bid contract with a company tied to Ament, the district got 18 bids from other firms in response to a request for proposals for COVID-19 testing. The district scrapped that effort after the winning bidder sought to renegotiate some of the terms.

Then, shortly before the school year started, Anza Vang, an executive with the Orange County Health Care Agency, recommended Ament to the school district as a testing partner, according to documents obtained by LAist.

A spokesperson for the Orange County Health Care Agency, Ellen Guevara, told LAist in an email that the testing laboratory that got the contract, Diagnostic Laboratory Science (DLS), "was one of a limited number of vendors at the time that were able to offer robust COVID-19 testing.” Ament helped broker the deal with DLS, according to district documents.

Representatives of DLS did not respond to requests for comment.

Several representatives for the school district told LAist the state Attorney General's office is also actively investigating the testing operation. The AG’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Fraud and COVID-19

The investigations into COVID-19 testing operations at Santa Ana Unified are a small snapshot of potential ethical and legal problems that occurred during the pandemic as unprecedented sums of money flowed from the federal government to address the public health emergency.

Isaac Bledsoe, an investigator with the U.S. Office of Inspector General for the federal Department of Health and Human Services, told LAist the amount of money defrauded nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic from patients and the federal government was "definitely hundreds of millions of dollars."

And it's still happening. The watchdog agency's most recent enforcement action related to COVID-19 fraud was in April of 2023.

Jodi Balma, a political science professor at Fullerton College who watches Orange County closely, said "the full report of misspending of COVID dollars has not begun to be written."

She and others told LAist that the pandemic caused many public agencies to bypass some accountability standards to rapidly respond to the changing emergency.

"We just don't have a procedure to guard against corruption, have transparency, and also go that quick," Balma said.

The Anaheim backstory

The documents LAist obtained from the district provide new details about Ament's involvement in securing a COVID-19 testing contract for his own and other businesses. Ament's company, alternately called Accurate Health Partners or Accurate Diagnostic Partners, coordinated the testing and delivered swabs to the lab for analysis.

The documents also provide insights into accusations that Ament sought to illegally profit off of the contract in the form of "kickbacks," as alleged in a recent investigation ordered by the city of Anaheim.

Ament's wife, Lea Ament, a nurse and former local hospital executive, was also involved in the school district's testing operation through her husband’s company and another company, Care One Health Partners, according to school district documents. Until recently, Lea Ament was listed as the secretary of Care One Health Partners on business documents filed with the California Secretary of State.

For years, Todd Ament played an outsized role in Anaheim politics before pleading guilty to federal criminal charges for defrauding a cannabis company, using federal COVID-19 business relief funds for personal expenses, and lying on his tax return.

None of those crimes appear to be connected to the Santa Ana Unified contracts. Todd Ament’s guilty pleas in the Anaheim probe pre-date subpoenas in the FBI’s Santa Ana inquiry.

The initial criminal complaint against Todd Ament in the Anaheim case was filed in May 2022 and noted that he had begun cooperating with the federal government. He has yet to be sentenced.

Todd Ament did not respond to multiple calls and emails requesting comment for this story. Daniel Silva, who is listed as Ament's lawyer in recent court filings, also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Reached by phone, Lea Ament declined to comment.

Providers set up to test students and staff of Santa Ana Unified for COVID-19 during the 2021-2022 school year.

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Santa Ana Unified, as part of a public records request

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Where the Santa Ana Unified inquiry stands

It's unclear where the investigations by the FBI and the California Attorney General’s office stand. Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office, which subpoenaed the records, said the agency could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation. A spokesperson for the FBI also said they could not comment and could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.

Lawyers, administrators, and current school board members for Santa Ana Unified said they could not comment because of the investigations.

The documents LAist obtained through a public records request reveal details behind allegations made during an independent corruption investigation ordered in 2022 by the Anaheim City Council. That investigation came in the wake of a federal probe and included allegations of potential improprieties in the award and administration of the lucrative COVID-19 testing contract with the Santa Ana Unified School District for the 2021-2022 school year.

In their final report, released in late July of 2023, the Anaheim investigators included portions of interviews with sources alleging that Todd Ament used "behind the scenes" influence to obtain a COVID-19 testing contract with Santa Ana Unified and then sought kickbacks from the deal for him and his wife, Lea Ament.

Eric Morgan, a representative of Diagnostic Laboratory Science (DLS), which initially held the school testing contract, told the investigators the contract was worth an estimated $128 million. Morgan estimated Todd Ament made $20-30 million from the district testing operation.

According to the new documents obtained by LAist, as well as testimony cited in the Anaheim corruption report, Todd Ament helped broker a no-bid contract for weekly COVID-19 testing of students and staff for the 2021-2022 school year on behalf of DLS, an established local laboratory.

The documents show that companies headed by Todd Ament and Lea Ament organized and oversaw the ordering and collection of saliva and nasal swabs for COVID-19 testing, and the delivery of those tests to the lab for analysis.

An internal memo from the school district, written two days after Todd Ament was charged with unrelated federal crimes, described his role as "a 3rd party COVID testing vendor and laboratory contact for DLS and MEDLAB2020." MedLab2020 succeeded DLS in analyzing COVID-19 tests for the district.

How the documents intersect with the Anaheim investigation

The independent corruption investigation commissioned by the Anaheim City Council in August 2022 and released in late July 2023 included allegations by people involved in Santa Ana Unified’s COVID-19 testing operation regarding Todd Ament’s role in securing and administering the contract.

In their final report, investigators noted that Todd Ament "seemed to vanish" from the Anaheim political scene around the beginning of 2021. Witnesses told investigators that he saw lucrative business opportunities in COVID-19 testing as businesses and schools began to reopen, according to the corruption report.

Two brothers, Firas and Moe Tamary, told investigators that they hired Todd Ament as a consultant for DLS for about three months at the beginning of 2021. Both Tamarys are listed as agents for DLS with the California Secretary of State.

They told investigators that Ament then quit his consulting job with them to start up his own business, Accurate Diagnostic Partners (previously known as Accurate Health Partners). According to the report, Accurate Diagnostic Partners administered COVID-19 tests and collected swabs to be delivered to DLS for testing.

Firas Tamary told investigators that Todd Ament claimed to have an "inside connection" at Santa Ana Unified and assured them they would get approval for a COVID-19 testing contract from the district's board of education.

Firas Tamary also told investigators that he and his brother agreed with Ament on a fixed price they would pay him per swab collected, based on the Medicare reimbursement rate. Tamary told investigators that at one point Todd Ament asked for a higher rate, but the Tamary brothers told him that would be considered “a kickback” and was against the law, according to the report.

A shift to another lab shortly after district approval

According to the final report of the Anaheim investigation, the Tamarys said that Todd Ament claimed to have a better offer from another lab and tried to pressure DLS to pay him more. Firas Tamary said they declined, telling Todd Ament that paying him above the set reimbursement rate would violate several state and federal laws.

That's when, Firas Tamary told investigators, Todd Ament "basically stole" the Santa Ana Unified contract from DLS and "found a different lab to work with," according to the report.

LAist reached out to Moe Tamary, Firas Tamary and Eric Morgan via phone and email to request comment on this story. They did not respond to multiple requests.

Shortly after the district's school board approved the COVID-19 testing contract with DLS, documents obtained by LAist show that Todd Ament began work to get the contract reassigned to a different lab: MedLab2020, whose CEO is Matthew Collins, according to business documents filed with the California Secretary of State. Collins did not respond to multiple requests for comment from LAist for this story.

Firas Tamary signed the reassignment agreement on Sept. 17, 2021, the district records show.

According to the criminal complaint filed against Todd Ament for his role in the Anaheim corruption scandal, Ament started cooperating with the FBI on Sept. 14, 2021.

On Sept. 28, 2021, Todd Ament wrote to the district's head of risk management, Dr. Sara Nazir, saying he wanted to discuss a revision to the contract that would assign all rights and responsibilities for COVID-19 testing of students and staff to MedLab2020. He also included a new paragraph in the contract that would officially list his company, Accurate Diagnostic Partners, as a subcontractor for the first time, according to school district records.

LAist was unable to find any record of the Santa Ana Unified school board approving the contract reassignment. An LAist review of board meeting agendas through January 2022 did not turn up any items related to the contract reassignment.

John Palacio, the former Santa Ana Unified trustee who was on the school board at the time, told LAist he was unaware of the contract reassignment. "And that is of serious concern to me as a board member because they [district staff] have an obligation to inform the board, especially about something as significant as that contract," Palacio said.

Palacio also said he had never heard of Todd Ament, or his involvement in the testing contract, until contacted by LAist for this story.

District emails obtained by LAist show Palacio questioned district administrators about why the district hadn't gone out to bid for the contract, how testing companies would be paid, and whether the district had a budget for supporting the testing operation with staff and other logistics.

He told LAist that district administrators told him at the time that the contract was no-cost and therefore didn't need to be put out for competitive bidding, and that testing would be paid, as the contract states, through private insurance or through the federal CARES Act. Palacio said his other questions went largely unanswered.

Fermin Leal, a spokesperson for the district, told LAist that current school board members and staff could not comment on the matter because of the ongoing investigation.

The roles of Lea Ament and others

Morgan, the DLS representative, told the Anaheim investigators that Care One Health Partners was in charge of ordering the COVID-19 tests that were administered to Santa Ana Unified students and staff. Documents obtained by LAist show that Care One Health Partners also acted as an intermediary between insurance companies and students and staff to help troubleshoot billing problems.

Lea Ament identifies herself in district documents obtained by LAist as the chief operating officer of Care One Health Partners, even though documents filed with the Secretary of State during the time of the contract identify her as the secretary of the company.

In emails obtained by LAist, Lea Ament also identifies herself as president of her husband's company, Accurate Health Care, which was coordinating testing for the district. She is not listed as an officer of the company on records filed with the Secretary of State.

Lea Ament was previously executive director of cancer services at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, but she left in 2021, according to a hospital spokesperson.

Dr. Albert Lai, a pain medicine doctor based in Placentia, is listed in records filed with the Secretary of State as the chief executive officer of Care One Health Partners. Lai did not respond to messages seeking comment left at his office and other phone numbers listed for him.

Morgan told Anaheim investigators that approximately 1 million tests would be ordered under the contract and Care One Health Partners would charge approximately $68 per test. He told investigators that Lea Ament would receive half of the money from every test.

"Todd's wife somehow, even though there were doctors' names on everything, worked out where she got fifty percent of all the profits for Care One and obviously, he [Todd Ament] owned Accurate, so he was dipping into multiple places," Morgan told investigators, according to their report.

Lai did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Kris Murray, a former member of the Anaheim City Council who runs a consulting firm, was also involved in the testing operation at Santa Ana Unified. Murray developed FAQs about the testing program and communicated with students and staff about insurance problems on behalf of the Aments' companies and the district, documents show.

Murray did not respond to LAist's requests for comment. It was not immediately clear who hired her to do the work and how much she was paid.

The end of the lucrative contract

On May 16, 2022, the federal government filed a criminal complaint against Todd Ament, detailing allegations that he defrauded a cannabis company, used federal COVID-19 business relief funds for personal expenses, and falsified tax returns.

Two days later, on May 18, 2022, Santa Ana Unified staff sent an internal memo informing district administrators of the charges against Todd Ament. They also stated that Collins, the CEO of MedLab2020, told the district he had bought Accurate Health Partners from Todd Ament the week prior, and that Todd Ament would not have a role in the company going forward.

In the Anaheim corruption report, Morgan, the DLS representative, told investigators he heard Collins had bought Todd Ament's company for $10 million.

The district signed a new contract with MedLab2020 in the spring of 2022 to provide weekly COVID-19 testing to students and staff in the 2022-2023 school year. This time, the district was responsible for paying the company for staff testing, according to the contract obtained by LAist, but not for student testing, which would continue to be billed to students' insurance companies or to federal pandemic relief programs.

At the start of the 2022-2023 school year, Santa Ana Unified dropped its mandate that all students and staff be tested weekly for COVID-19, instead making the testing voluntary.

MedLab2020 provided voluntary testing until the district received the federal government's subpoena on Feb. 6, 2023. In an email sent the next day, Nazir — who headed the school district's risk management department and oversaw COVID-19 testing for the district — advised that she was suspending MedLab2020 from conducting further COVID-19 tests on campus.

Fermin Leal, the district’s spokesperson, told LAist that the district gradually shifted from in-person testing to providing at-home testing kits to students and staff during the 2022-2023 school year. Leal said those who wanted in-person testing were referred to community providers.

By then, vaccines were widely available and the chaos of the early pandemic days were behind school administrators.

LAist reviewed details of the Santa Ana Unified COVID-19 testing agreements with Jose Moreno, a former Anaheim city council member. Moreno has criticized the influence of Anaheim's business elite — which has often been behind closed doors — over public policymaking in recent years.

"It's not surprising," Moreno said of Todd Ament's involvement in the highly lucrative no-bid contract.

"Anytime there's public dollars that are supposed to help people, we see the same pigs at the trough," he said.

Good morning and happy Tuesday! Today we have a nice break from the unusual weather we've had — today will be warm with highs in the 70s.

The coasts will be on the cooler end, with highs in the upper 60s except for Long Beach, where daytime highs will reach 70 degrees. More inland, expect highs in the mid 70s, and up to 80 degrees in the warmest parts of the San Fernando Valley. In the high desert, it will reach up to 73 degrees, and up to 81 degrees in the Coachella Valley.

Tonight's lows will drop to the 50s.

This day in history

On this day in 2010, Kobe Bryant signed a three-year contract extension with the Lakers worth $87 million.

Things to do

• Moth Mainstage: Our friends at KCRW are hosting storytelling night The Moth at the United Theater (formerly the Theatre at the Ace Hotel). Always an evening of laughs, tears, and incredible true stories, this month’s theme is "Where the Heart Is" and features host Amir Baghdadchi and an array of talented storytellers.

Check out our full list of things to do this week.