OC Sheriff’s search & rescue teams use expertise to recover lost hiker

• May 10, 2025

Six Orange County Sheriff Department search and rescue teams spent hours in cold and rainy conditions scouring the rugged and steep terrain along trails near Sitton Peak off Ortega Highway on May 5, trying to find a hiker who had not been seen for more than 12 hours.

They used a variety of tactics, including comparing boot prints like crime-scene investigators, and strategies for covering large amounts of space efficiently to successfully find the lost hiker, who was weakened by spending the night in the elements, but ultimately OK.

“Every single search goes the same way, we have a great plan to go out there and execute and find the person,” said Sgt. Jason McLennan, the department’s search and rescue coordinator who has worked in this field for a decade. “However, most of the time, the plan needs to be modified, changed, or expanded. There always comes a point where we’re, ‘What are we missing?’ No matter what the search, when we hear over the radio, we found the person, it’s the most successful thing of the day.”

Orange County’s search and rescue program was founded shortly after World War II and now has around 90 members. The unit is considered one of the top four in the state, McLennan said.

In a year, the teams, which train monthly, respond to about 90 rescue callouts; about one-third are similar to this scenario, officials said.

The teams were first alerted around 3 a.m. on May 5 to the missing hiker when McLennan received a call from his counterpart at the Riverside Sheriff’s Department asking for assistance.

Involved in another rescue effort in San Jacinto, the department asked if the Orange County teams could help with searching for the hiker who had been reported missing near Sitton Peak. The two agencies often collaborate through mutual aid, McLennan said.

“The entire (search and rescue) design is based off volunteers and relies on the mutual aid system of neighbors helping neighbors,” McLennan said.

By 5 a.m., McLennan had assembled his teams of two — most are volunteers who serve in other capacities in the department or are reserve deputies. All are highly trained in wilderness rescue, and some have additional specialties, including rope, cliffside rescue and medical skills, McLennan said.

Devon Kemp, a reserve captain with OCSD who was part of the rescue and helps coordinate the reservists, was among the first on the scene. From briefing the three hikers the lost man had headed out with, he learned the group started hiking the day before with a plan to do a 20-mile loop near Sitton Peak. The area is a popular hiking spot just a few miles into Riverside County along the rural Ortega Highway.

Kemp said the man began cramping up and told his friends to continue on without him.

“The three friends kept going, and the last time they saw him,” Kemp said, based on forensics, was around 6:30 p.m.

When the friends finished their hike, they waited for the fourth man, looking for him for a while. But when he didn’t show up, they called 9-1-1, Kemp said.

As officials began their search, cold and foggy conditions made the rugged terrain an even greater challenge. Aerial support wasn’t an option.

After hiking about three miles, the first group of three search teams sent out arrived at Four Corners, a spot where multiple trails merge.

“We were extrapolating that if a missing person had come back down to the trailhead, he could have gotten to that place and, being dark, he wouldn’t find the trail he needed to find and may have gotten off the trail and lost,” Kemp said.

Using photos they had taken of the three hikers’ shoes, the teams looked among the footprints, narrowing down which would probably belong to the missing hiker. Other clues the team looks for could be a tossed apple core or water bottles, clothing pieces, broken branches or an area that shows where a hiker could have exited the trail.

Teams were sent up Sitton Peak and to other nearby trails, such as Bear Ridge and Bear Valley. One team hiked 13 miles.

“We do something called containment,” said Kemp, a computer engineer who has volunteered for the search and rescue unit for 25 years. “We were able to knock some of the trails off. We contain those trails, say they’re out of bounds, and focus on other trails.”

Kemp said searches start off as “hasty searches,” which assumes the person is responsive and on the trail.

“They go up the trail pretty fast, calling his name and looking for a response back,” he said. “As the day went on, we slowed down because we didn’t find him on the main trails and assumed maybe he’s unresponsive or maybe hypothermic. We look off the side of the trail, for slide marks or a body over the side.”

McLennan said ideally, the search crews would have been aided by an airship. There was a small window where the Riverside Sheriff Department got a helicopter out from Hemet, he said, but the crews had only 10 minutes before the weather closed up again.

By this time, some of Riverside’s search and rescue team members and their coordinator showed up and worked with McLennan and Kemp, thinking through the challenges. More teams headed out.

As the Orange County department’s sixth team headed up around noon on Monday, the hiker was found.

“They saw him sitting on the side of the trail,” Kemp said.

The team did a quick medical assessment, the man was cold, dehydrated and weak from not having any food.

A second attempt to get a helicopter in proved unsuccessful, so the rescuers hiked the man out. But before that, they gave him the necessary gear, water and food from their own packs.

After a slow hike down, the man was brought out and examined again by a paramedic team from Cal Fire to see if more medical attention was needed. The hiker, who is from Los Angeles, declined through the department to be interviewed.

“Our team was in the right place at the right time,” McLennan said. “That containment was huge. As we narrowed down the search, that’s what led us to being able to find him in that area, even with him moving around.”

Both Kemp and McLennan said it’s a guess on whether the hiker might have made it out on his own.

“I turn right and it’s two miles to the roadway, I turn left and it’s 13 miles before I hit civilization,” McLennan said, thinking through the hiker’s options. “I don’t know how familiar he was with the area. It could have been a lucky guess or a bad decision.”

McLennan said there are cold cases where hikers or other missing people weren’t recovered, but they are never forgotten. He said teams will go back over situations to cast a fresh eye on what could’ve happened and sometimes even purposely train in areas where someone went missing with hopes of finding new clues.

“We found a missing hiker in a very short amount of time and he’s alive,” McLennan said about this most recent successful rescue. “That is a huge success by any metrics. The fact we were able to work so well with another agency outside our own jurisdiction tells the success of what our program and their program is.”

“It never gets old,” Kemp added, “to hear the phrase, ‘We found him!’”

​ Orange County Register 

12-year-old boy shot and killed at Compton park on Friday afternoon

• May 10, 2025

A 12-year-old boy was shot and killed in Fig/Oleander Park in Compton on Friday afternoon, May 9.

Deputies from the Compton Sheriff’s Station responded to the park at North Oleander Avenue and West Fig Street regarding an assault with a deadly weapon/gunshot victim at 3:55 p.m. Friday, authorities said.

They found the boy in the park and began first aid measures. Paramedics from the Compton Fire Department arrived and took him to a hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.

Witnesses described the suspect in the shooting as a man wearing all black clothing – including a black ski mask – who was last seen running northbound on Oleander Avenue and out of view, deputies said.

Sheriff’s investigators have not determined a motive for the shooting.

Anyone with information regarding the shooting is asked to call the Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau at 323-890-5500. Tipsters who prefer to remain anonymous can call Crime Stoppers at 800-222-8477 or visit lacrimestoppers.org.

​ Orange County Register 

Memorial set for Loyola High student, tennis star killed by alleged DUI driver

• May 10, 2025

A community celebration of life will be held Saturday evening, May 10 for Braun Levi, a star tennis player at Loyola High School who was fatally struck by an alleged impaired driver in Manhattan Beach, where his family had relocated after losing their home in the Palisades Fire.

The event will be held at Loyola High School’s Hayden Circle, 1901 Venice Blvd., at 6 p.m. It will be followed by a reception.

Levi, 18, was walking in the 100 block of South Sepulveda Boulevard with a friend around 12:45 a.m. Sunday when he was struck. He was taken to a hospital, where he died.

The motorist, 33-year-old Jenia Resha Belt, was arrested at the scene on suspicion of DUI, according to Manhattan Beach police.

Levi, who was found in the street by responding officers, was nationally ranked in tennis, and his family told reporters he was bound for the University of Virginia.

The young man’s family had moved to Manhattan Beach after their Pacific Palisades home was destroyed in January’s Palisades Fire.

“Braun was a shining presence in our Loyola family, bringing light, joy and inspiration to everyone he touched,” Loyola High School posted on its website. “As the Varsity tennis team captain for three years, Braun was a true leader and student athlete, serving as a member of the Student Council, a senior Big Brother, Kairos retreat leader and volleyball team manager.

“… May his family find peace, strength and solace in the embrace of our collective love and support.”

The U.S. Tennis Association Southern California published an extensive tribute to Levi, saying he “had a way of brightening every room he walked into; he was radiant. His sportsmanship never wavered. And his love — for tennis, people, and life — was always evident.”

His friend and doubles partner, Cooper Schwartz, recalled in the tribute that Levi was a star on the tennis circuit, on and off the court.

“At any tournament we played together, Braun was a celebrity,” Schwartz said. “He somehow had a memory made with at least every single player in the draw. At The Ojai Invitational, I lost count of how many kids came up just to say hi to him. Braun was SoCal tennis royalty, everyone knew him, and everyone loved him.”

Friend and occasional mixed-doubles partner Lexi Wolf said “there was something special” about Levi.

“He brought this energy that lit up every court and made you feel seen, encouraged, and important — no matter who you were,” Wolf said in the USTA tribute. “That’s just the kind of person he was. He was able to make every ordinary experience become something unforgettable. His energy on the court was unmatched, full of fire, joy, and this contagious passion that made everyone around him better.”

Belt remains jailed without bail, although she has not yet been charged in connection with Levi’s death.

​ Orange County Register 

Orange County swimming’s top times, records for CIF-SS Division 1 finals

• May 10, 2025

Support our high school sports coverage by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribe now

A look at the top times this season and Orange County records entering the CIF-SS Division 1 swimming finals at Mt. SAC on Saturday, May 10 at noon:

O.C. SWIMMING RECORDS AND 2025 LEADING TIMES

BOYS

200-yard medley relay (O.C. record 1:29.01 Santa Margarita 2023) — Santa Margarita 1:32.73

200 free (O.C. record 1:33.26 Grant Shoults, Santa Margarita, 2016) — Maksymowski (Nor) 1:35.81

200 IM (O.C. record 1:45.42 Corey Okubo, University, 2014) — Vu (FV) 1:48.43

50 free (O.C. record 19.69 Michael Cavic, Tustin, 2002) —  Ohl (NH) 19.79

100 butterfly (O.C. record 46.47 David Schmitt, San Juan Hills, 2023) — Arie (NH) 48.28; Hitchens (Nor) 48.29

100 free (O.C. record 43.85 Derya Buyukuncu, Woodbridge, 1994) — Hitchens (Nor) 44.37

500 free (O.C. record 4:12.87 Grant Shoults, Santa Margarita, 2016) — Maksymowski (Nor) 4:25.28

200 free relay (O.C. record 1:22.08 Santa Margarita 2023) — Northwood 1:22.55

100 back (O.C. record 47.36 Humberto Najera, Santa Margarita, 2023) — Hitchens (Nor) 48.47

100 breast (O.C. record 53.40 Trent Pellini, Dana Hills, 2017) — Santos (MD) 54.26

400 free relay (O.C. record 2:58.04 Northwood 2024) — Northwood 2:59.69

GIRLS

200 medley relay (O.C. record 1:39.04 2022) — Santa Margarita 1:42.36

200 free (O.C. record 1:42.98 Teagan O’Dell, Santa Margarita, 2025) —  O’Dell 1:42.98

200 IM (O.C. record 1:53.38 Teagan O’Dell, Santa Margarita, 2023) — O’Dell 1:54.73

50 free (O.C. record 24.40 Teagan O’Dell, Santa Margarita, 2023) — O’Dell (SM) 22.59r

100 butterfly (O.C. record 51.53 Katie McLaughlin, Santa Margarita, 2015) — O’Dell (SM) 52.17

100 free (O.C. record 48.37 Teagan O’Dell, Santa Margarita, 2024) — O’Dell (SM) 49.12

500 free (O.C. record 4:37.30 Janet Evans, El Dorado, 1988) — Ton (FV) 4:44.54

200 free relay (O.C. record 1:29.61 Santa Margarita 2023) — Santa Margarita 1:31.74

100 back (O.C. record 50.96 Teagan O’Dell, Santa Margarita 2023) — O’Dell (SM) 51.98

100 breast (O.C. record 59.73 Teagan O’Dell, Santa Margarita 2023) — Nwaizu (CC) 1:00.00

400 free relay (O.C. record 3.14.80 Santa Margarita 2022) — Santa Margarita 3:24.68

Please send updates to Dan Albano at dalbano@scng.com or @ocvarsityguy on X and Instagram

​ Orange County Register 

Skype shut down for good, but users still have these alternatives

• May 10, 2025

By KELVIN CHAN, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Skype is dead. What now?

Microsoft’s shutdown of Skype on May 5 sent millions of users scrambling to find an alternative to the pioneering internet phone service.

Skype, which Microsoft bought in 2011, was beloved by a dwindling group of users who appreciated how it let them make cheap long-distance calls as well as communicate with other users through chat messages, voice or video calls.

Some liked its simplicity and ease of use — an advantage, for example, when setting up a communications app for an elderly parent living far away.

Or they just used it out of habit.

Skype was founded in 2003 and was among the first in a wave of communication services that used voice over internet protocol technology (VoIP), which converts audio into a digital signal.

Skype’s disappearance also inconveniences Americans and other expatriates living overseas who signed up because they needed an U.S.-based number to receive text authentication codes from, say, a bank back home. It was also handy for calling 800 numbers for free even if you weren’t living in North America.

Here is a guide for life after Skype:

What’s happening

Microsoft announced in late February that it was shutting down Skype on May 5 and shifting some of its services to Microsoft Teams, its flagship office videoconferencing and group collaboration platform.

Skype users can use their existing accounts to log into Teams and have the option to automatically migrate their contacts and chats.

If you had a Skype number or a calling subscription, it stopped automatically renewing on April 3.

If your account still has credit, you can access Skype’s dial pad from the web portal or Teams to make calls.

Skype numbers won’t immediately expire on May 5 so you’ll still be able to receive calls until your subscription expires. But you’ll have to use Teams or keep the Skype dial pad open on the web portal to receive them.

Porting your number(s)

If your Skype number hasn’t expired and you don’t want to lose it, you should transfer it to another provider.

Skype numbers can be ported to a phone carrier or any number of other VoIP services. But you’ll have to start the process through the new provider, not Skype.

Google Voice

Google users can access the online search giant’s internet phone service to make calls from a smartphone or a desktop web browser. You can get your own Google Voice phone number and use features like call forwarding and voicemail. Or you can port your number from another service like Skype, but it will cost $20.

Calls to U.S., Canadian or Puerto Rican numbers are free. Rates for other countries vary.

The free version of Google Voice is only available to U.S. residents physically located in the 48 contiguous states, so that means expatriate Americans can only use it if they registered before they moved overseas.

“You cannot sign up for a Google Voice number while outside the USA,” according to a help page. “Do not try to circumvent this by using a VPN.”

Viber

Owned by Japan’s Rakuten, Viber was long considered one of the closest competitors to Skype. One key difference is that Skype users don’t need a phone number and are identified by their usernames, while Viber users need a number to register for service.

Similar to Skype, Viber users can buy credit or packages to call phone numbers around the world but it’s no longer possible to get a Viber number to receive calls.

Zoom

The videoconferencing service that’s become a byword for online company meetings offers a calling service, Zoom Phone, and features like number porting and the ability to send and receive SMS text messages.

Take note that Zoom Phone isn’t free. There are various calling plans that involve a monthly subscription cost and extra fees for international calls.

Teams

Microsoft users have the option of making calls on Teams, dubbed Teams Phone. Like Zoom Phone, you’ll need to buy a subscription and pay extra for international calls.

But it’s not an option for regular people because Microsoft says Teams Phone isn’t for consumer use and is only available to small and medium-sized businesses.

Wireless Carriers

If you absolutely need a U.S. number but live overseas, sign up for service with a low-cost virtual wireless carrier that offers cheap cellphone plans or pay-as-you-go rates.

One provider, Tello, offers monthly plans for as little as $5 and says users can activate its service even if they’re living outside the U.S.

Because mobile virtual network operators like Tello are essentially wireless phone companies that piggyback off a bigger carrier’s physical network, you can’t use it to make calls on a computer or an app.

VoIP it

There are a slew of Skype pretenders offering phone calls over the internet, such as Zoiper, VoIP.ms, CallCentric, Mytello, and Virtual Landline. Many are aimed at business users.

Some are capitalizing on Skype’s disappearance. Hushed, which started as an anonymous calling app, bills itself as a Skype alternative. Users can buy a phone number from the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom or Puerto Rico or port their own number.

It warns that some of its numbers aren’t guaranteed to work with third-party verification text messages.

“We do not intentionally block anyone from receiving these codes, but it’s common that some services will prevent verification texts from being sent to certain phone numbers due to their own security policies,” Hushed says on its website.

Park your number

Maybe you can’t decide which calling service you want to switch to. If you want to save your current number, there are services to just park your number like NumberBarn.com and Parkmyphone.com.

They let you store a phone number for a monthly fee while relaying any text messages sent to that number. You can port the number to another service whenever you want.

Beware, you can only port in U.S. or Canadian phone numbers.

eSIMs

What about an international eSIM? They’re the virtual version of the mobile phone SIM card that you can buy and add to your phone when you’re on a trip to save on roaming fees.

They offer cheap data access rates so you can use the internet without worrying about racking up a huge bill when you get home.

Unfortunately, you can’t port a Skype number to an international eSIM because of “the fundamental differences” between VoIP services and traditional mobile networks, said Pedro Maiquez, co-founder of eSIM provider Holafly. “Skype numbers are not tied to a mobile carrier’s physical infrastructure, making them incompatible with mobile eSIM solutions.”

Is there a tech topic that you think needs explaining? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your suggestions for future editions of One Tech Tip.

​ Orange County Register 

As reading scores fall, states turn to phonics — but not without a fight

• May 10, 2025

By Robbie Sequeira, Stateline.org

As states rush to address falling literacy scores, a new kind of education debate in state legislatures is taking hold: not whether reading instruction needs fixing, but how to fix it.

More than a dozen states have enacted laws banning public school educators from teaching youngsters to read using an approach that’s been popular for decades. The method, known as “three-cueing,” encourages kids to figure out unfamiliar words using context clues such as meaning, sentence structure and visual hints.

In the past two years, several states have instead embraced instruction rooted in what’s known as the “science of reading.” That approach leans heavily on phonics — relying on letter and rhyming sounds to read words such as cat, hat and rat.

The policy discussions on early literacy are unfolding against a backdrop of alarming national reading proficiency levels. The 2024 Nation’s Report Card revealed that 40% of fourth graders and 33% of eighth graders scored below the basic reading level — the highest percentages in decades.

No state improved in fourth- or eighth-grade reading in 2024. Eight states — Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah and Vermont — scored worse than they did a year or two prior in eighth-grade reading.

Five — Arizona, Florida, Nebraska, South Dakota and Vermont — saw dips in their fourth-grade reading scores.

In response to these troubling trends, a growing number of states are moving beyond localized efforts and tackling literacy through statewide legislation.

New Jersey last year mandated universal K-3 literacy screenings. Indiana lawmakers this month passed a bill that would allow some students to retake required reading tests before being held back in third grade; that bill is en route to the governor’s desk.

Oregon and Washington are weighing statewide literacy coaching and training models, while lawmakers in Montana introduced a bill to allow literacy interventions to cover broader reading and academic skills, not just early reading basics.

Mississippi, a state seen as a model for turnaround in literacy rates over the past decade, seeks to expand and require evidence-based reading interventions, mandatory literacy screenings and targeted teacher training, and to explicitly ban the use of three-cueing methods in reading instruction in grades 4-8.

Together, these efforts signal a national shift: States are treating literacy not as a local initiative, but as the foundation of public education policy.

“Literacy is the lever,” said Tafshier Cosby, the senior director of the Center for Organizing and Partnerships at the National Parents Union, an advocacy group. “If states focus on that, we see bipartisan wins. But the challenge is making that a statewide priority, not just a district-by-district hope.”

‘It’s the system that needs fixing’

Before he was even sworn in, first-term Georgia Democratic state Sen. RaShaun Kemp, a former teacher and principal, had already drafted a bill to end the use of the three-cueing system in Georgia classrooms.

This month, the final version passed the state legislature without a single “no” vote. GOP Gov. Brian Kemp signed it into law Monday.

Sen. Kemp said his passion for literacy reform stretches back decades, shaped by experiences tutoring children at a local church as a college student in the early 2000s. It was there, he said, that he began noticing patterns in how students struggled with foundational reading.

“In my experience, I saw kids struggle to identify the word they were reading. I saw how some kids were guessing what the word was instead of decoding,” Kemp recalled. “And it’s not technology or screens that’s the problem. It’s what teachers are being instructed on how to teach reading. It’s the system that needs fixing, not the teachers.”

The new law requires the Professional Standards Commission — a state agency that oversees teacher prep and certification— to adopt rules mandating evidence-based reading instruction aligned with the science of reading, a set of practices rooted in decades of cognitive research on how children best learn to read.

“Current strategies used to teach literacy include methods that teach students to guess rather than read, preventing them from reaching their full potential,” Sen. Kemp said in a public statement following the bill’s legislative passage. “I know we can be better, and I’m proud to see our legislative body take much-needed steps to help make Georgia the number one state for literacy.”

In West Virginia, lawmakers have introduced similar bills that would require the state’s teachers to be certified in the science of reading.

Cosby, of the National Parents Union, said local policy changes can be driven by parents even before legislatures act.

“All politics are local,” Cosby said. “Parents don’t need to wait for statewide mandates — they can ask school boards for universal screeners and structured literacy now.”

Still, some parents worry their states are simply funding more studies on early literacy rather than taking direct action to address it.

A Portland, Oregon, parent of three — one of whom has dyslexia — sent written testimony this year urging lawmakers to skip further studies and immediately implement structured literacy statewide.

“We do not need another study to tell us what we already know — structured literacy is the most effective way to teach all children to read, particularly those with dyslexia and other reading challenges,” wrote Katherine Hoffman.

Opposition to ‘science of reading’

Unlike in Georgia, the “science of reading” has met resistance in other states.

In California, legislation that would require phonics-based reading instruction statewide has faced opposition from English learner advocates who argue that a one-size-fits-all approach may not effectively serve multilingual students.

In opposition to the bill, the California Teachers Association argued that by codifying a rigid definition of the “science of reading,” lawmakers ignore the evolving nature of reading research and undermine teachers’ ability to meet the diverse needs of their students.

“Placing a definition for ‘science of reading’ in statute is problematic,” wrote Seth Bramble, a legislative advocate for the California Teachers Association in a March letter addressed to the state’s Assembly Education Committee. “This bill would carve into stone scientific knowledge that by its very nature is constantly being tested, validated, refuted, revised, and improved.”

Similarly, in Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in March vetoed a bill that would have reversed changes to the state’s scoring system to align the state’s benchmarks with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal assessment tool that has recently been hit with funding cuts and layoffs under the Trump administration. Evers said in his veto that Republican lawmakers were stepping on the state superintendent’s independence.

That veto is another step in the evolution of a broader constitutional fight over literacy policy and how literacy funds are appropriated and released. In 2023, Wisconsin lawmakers set aside$50 million for a new statewide literacy initiative, but disagreements over legislative versus executive control have stalled its disbursement.

Indiana’s legislature faced criticism from educators over a 2024 mandate requiring 80 hours of literacy training for pre-K to sixth-grade teachers before they can renew their licenses. Teachers argued that the additional requirements were burdensome and did not account for their professional expertise.

In Illinois, literacy struggles have been building for more than a decade, according to Mailee Smith, senior director of policy at the Illinois Policy Institute. Today, only 3 in 10 Illinois third- and fourth-graders can read at grade level, based on state and national assessments.

Although Illinois lawmakers amended the school code in 2023 to create a state literacy plan, Smith noted the plan is only guidance and does not require districts to adopt evidence-based reading instruction. She urged local school boards to act on their own.

“If students can’t read by third grade, half of fourth-grade curriculum becomes incomprehensible,” she said. “A student’s likelihood to graduate high school can be predicted by their reading skill at the end of third grade.”

Despite the challenges, Smith said even small steps can make a real difference.

“Screening, intervention, parental notice, science-based instruction and thoughtful grade promotion — those are the five pillars, and Illinois and even local school districts can implement some of these steps right away,” she said.

“It doesn’t have to be daunting.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

​ Orange County Register 

At Social Security, these are the days of the living dead

• May 10, 2025

By Darius Tahir, KFF Health News

Rennie Glasgow, who has served 15 years at the Social Security Administration, is seeing something new on the job: dead people.

They’re not really dead, of course. In four instances over the past few weeks, he told KFF Health News, his Schenectady, New York, office has seen people come in for whom “there is no information on the record, just that they are dead.” So employees have to “resurrect” them — affirm that they’re living, so they can receive their benefits.

Revivals were “sporadic” before, and there’s been an uptick in such cases across upstate New York, said Glasgow. He is also an official with the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represented 42,000 Social Security employees just before the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.

Martin O’Malley, who led the Social Security Administration toward the end of the Joe Biden administration, said in an interview that he had heard similar stories during a recent town hall in Racine, Wisconsin. “In that room of 200 people, two people raised their hands and said they each had a friend who was wrongly marked as deceased when they’re very much alive,” he said.

It’s more than just an inconvenience, because other institutions rely on Social Security numbers to do business, Glasgow said. Being declared dead “impacts their bank account. This impacts their insurance. This impacts their ability to work. This impacts their ability to get anything done in society.”

“They are terminating people’s financial lives,” O’Malley said.

Though it’s just one of the things advocates and lawyers worry about, these erroneous deaths come after a pair of initiatives from new leadership at the SSA to alter or update its databases of the living and the dead.

Holders of millions of Social Security numbers have been marked as deceased. Separately, according to The Washington Post and The New York Times, thousands of numbers belonging to immigrants have been purged, cutting them off from banks and commerce, in an effort to encourage these people to “self-deport.”

Glasgow said SSA employees received an agency email in April about the purge, instructing them how to resurrect beneficiaries wrongly marked dead. “Why don’t you just do due diligence to make sure what you’re doing in the first place is correct?” he said.

The incorrectly marked deaths are just a piece of the Trump administration’s crash program purporting to root out fraud, modernize technology, and secure the program’s future.

But KFF Health News’ interviews with more than a dozen beneficiaries, advocates, lawyers, current and former employees, and lawmakers suggest the overhaul is making the agency worse at its primary job: sending checks to seniors, orphans, widows, and those with disabilities.

Philadelphian Lisa Seda, who has cancer, has been struggling for weeks to sort out her 24-year-old niece’s difficulties with Social Security’s disability insurance program. There are two problems: first, trying to change her niece’s address; second, trying to figure out why the program is deducting roughly $400 a month for Medicare premiums, when her disability lawyer — whose firm has a policy against speaking on the record — believes they could be zero.

Since March, sometimes Social Security has direct-deposited payments to her niece’s bank account and other times mailed checks to her old address. Attempting to sort that out has been a morass of long phone calls on hold and in-person trips seeking an appointment.

Before 2025, getting the agency to process changes was usually straightforward, her lawyer said. Not anymore.

The need is dire. If the agency halts the niece’s disability payments, “then she will be homeless,” Seda recalled telling an agency employee. “I don’t know if I’m going to survive this cancer or not, but there is nobody else to help her.”

Some of the problems are technological. According to whistleblower information provided to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, the agency’s efforts to process certain data have been failing more frequently. When that happens, “it can delay or even stop payments to Social Security recipients,” the committee recently told the agency’s inspector general.

While tech experts and former Social Security officials warn about the potential for a complete system crash, day-to-day decay can be an insidious and serious problem, said Kathleen Romig, formerly of the Social Security Administration and its advisory board and currently the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Beneficiaries could struggle to get appointments or the money they’re owed, she said.

For its more than 70 million beneficiaries nationwide, Social Security is crucial. More than a third of recipients said they wouldn’t be able to afford necessities if the checks stopped coming, according to National Academy of Social Insurance survey results published in January.

Advocates and lawyers say lately Social Security is failing to deliver, to a degree that’s nearly unprecedented in their experience.

Carolyn Villers, executive director of the Massachusetts Senior Action Council, said two of her members’ March payments were several days late. “For one member that meant not being able to pay rent on time,” she said. “The delayed payment is not something I’ve heard in the last 20 years.”

When KFF Health News presented the agency with questions, Social Security officials passed them off to the White House. White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston referred to Trump’s “resounding mandate” to make government more efficient.

“He has promised to protect social security, and every recipient will continue to receive their benefits,” Huston said in an email. She did not provide specific, on-the-record responses to questions.

Complaints about missed payments are mushrooming. The Arizona attorney general’s office had received approximately 40 complaints related to delayed or disrupted payments by early April, spokesperson Richie Taylor told KFF Health News.

A Connecticut agency assisting people on Medicare said complaints related to Social Security — which often helps administer payments and enroll patients in the government insurance program primarily for those over age 65 — had nearly doubled in March compared with last year.

Lawyers representing beneficiaries say that, while the historically underfunded agency has always had its share of errors and inefficiencies, it’s getting worse as experienced employees have been let go.

“We’re seeing more mistakes being made,” said James Ratchford, a lawyer in West Virginia with 17 years’ experience representing Social Security beneficiaries. “We’re seeing more things get dropped.”

What gets dropped, sometimes, are records of basic transactions. Kim Beavers of Independence, Missouri, tried to complete a periodic ritual in February: filling out a disability update form saying she remains unable to work. But her scheduled payments in March and April didn’t show.

She got an in-person appointment to untangle the problem — only to be told there was no record of her submission, despite her showing printouts of the relevant documents to the agency representative. Beavers has a new appointment scheduled for May, she said.

Social Security employees frequently cite missing records to explain their inability to solve problems when they meet with lawyers and beneficiaries. A disability lawyer whose firm’s policy does not allow them to be named had a particularly puzzling case: One client, a longtime Social Security disability recipient, had her benefits reassessed. After winning on appeal, the lawyer went back to the agency to have the payments restored — the recipient had been going without since February. But there was nothing there.

“To be told they’ve never been paid benefits before is just chaos, right? Unconditional chaos,” the lawyer said.

Researchers and lawyers say they have a suspicion about what’s behind the problems at Social Security: the Elon Musk-led effort to revamp the agency.

Some 7,000 SSA employees have reportedly been let go; O’Malley has estimated that 3,000 more would leave the agency. “As the workloads go up, the demoralization becomes deeper, and people burn out and leave,” he predicted in an April hearing held by House Democrats. “It’s going to mean that if you go to a field office, you’re going to see a heck of a lot more empty, closed windows.”

The departures have hit the agency’s regional payment centers hard. These centers help process and adjudicate some cases. It’s the type of behind-the-scenes work in which “the problems surface first,” Romig said. But if the staff doesn’t have enough time, “those things languish.”

Languishing can mean, in some cases, getting dropped by important programs like Medicare. Social Security often automatically deducts premiums, or otherwise administers payments, for the health program.

Lately, Melanie Lambert, a senior advocate at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, has seen an increasing number of cases in which the agency determines beneficiaries owe money to Medicare. The cash is sent to the payment centers, she said. And the checks “just sit there.”

Beneficiaries lose Medicare, and “those terminations also tend to happen sooner than they should, based on Social Security’s own rules,” putting people into a bureaucratic maze, Lambert said.

Employees’ technology is more often on the fritz. “There’s issues every single day with our system. Every day, at a certain time, our system would go down automatically,” said Glasgow, of Social Security’s Schenectady office. Those problems began in mid-March, he said.

The new problems leave Glasgow suspecting the worst. “It’s more work for less bodies, which will eventually hype up the inefficiency of our job and make us, make the agency, look as though it’s underperforming, and then a closer step to the privatization of the agency,” he said.

Jodie Fleischer of Cox Media Group contributed to this report.

©2025 Kaiser Health News. Visit khn.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. ©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

​ Orange County Register 

Why Pride of Madeira is such a memorable, drought-tolerant flowering plant

• May 10, 2025

The memories of first encounters with certain plants last a lifetime.

Often, such plants are discovered growing in places where they are not given any human care but rely solely on what nature (or God) provides in the particular spot where they have made their home.

For me, one such plant is the Pride of Madeira (Echium candicans). This plant appears at the top of the list of drought-tolerant, heavy-flowering species. My first meeting with it occurred on Catalina Island. I saw it growing in reckless abandon on a bluff overlooking the entrance to a renovated building known as the Catalina Casino, although it was never used for gambling. (Casino means “little house” in Italian and is meant as a gathering place for entertainment.) Sandy soil on ocean-exposed bluffs creates an identical microclimate to that found on Madeira, an archipelago situated 400 miles off the northwest coast of Africa. It so happens that the Canary Islands, located 300 miles south of Madeira, are the only other place that qualifies as Pride of Madeira’s habitat.

For two decades, I have had this plant growing in my front yard, having seen many generations come and go. It grows rapidly to a height of six feet, flowers prolifically in its second year, and then drops off in flower production in subsequent years until it’s mostly just foliage. At that point, it is removed, but in the meantime, the next generation of seedlings, germinated from its seeds, has matured in its vicinity.

Pride of Madeira possesses uniquely charming, fuzzy floral cones that can rise up to a foot long. Mine are mauve in color but they may appear in every hue of blue, from baby or powder blue to royal and marine blue or purple. It is also true that, depending on the amount of sunlight or your angle of view, the flower color you see may vary. There are occasional pink or magenta specimens of this plant as well.

The species epithet of candicans means white, yet the white flowered version of this plant is another species, available from San Marcos Growers (smgrowers.com) as white tower of jewels (Echium simplex). Altogether, San Marcos grows six different Echium varieties, including San Bruno Pink and two varieties with variegated foliage. It should be noted that the most spectacular member of this group is red tower of jewels (Echium wildpretii), whose gigantic flower cones may extend to eight feet in length. It’s easily sprouted seeds that are widely available through Internet vendors. Although red tower of jewels produces only one inflorescence per plant, when many of them grow side by side, it is a stunning display of unparalleled botanical glory. Somehow, the sight of them evokes the scene from the movie “Fantasia” where broomsticks are marching mischievously en masse.

Aside from the exotic look of its flowers, Pride of Madeira is noteworthy as a pollinator plant. On any warm day this spring, I would not be exaggerating if I told you that I would see hundreds of bees buzzing around my plant which is graced by several dozen flower cones. It you have fruit trees, it is highly recommended that you plant pollinator species such as this among them. In order for fruit to grow to its maximum size and sweetness, it needs to be pollinated multiple times, so the more bees that are around, the better. Here it is useful to recall that bees are most attracted to blue, purple. violet, white, and yellow flowers.

Honeybees are necessary for pollination of most fruit trees as well as cucurbit vegetables such as cucumber, squash, pumpkin, cantaloupe, and watermelon. However, solanaceous vegetables — tomato, pepper, and eggplant — have anthers that hold on tightly to the pollen attached to them. This pollen can only be dislodged by a strong breeze or by the frenzied wing-flapping of bumblebees or solitary bees. Bumblebees do not pollinate in the manner of honeybees by carrying pollen on their bodies from flower to flower. Instead, they practice buzz pollination, also known as floral sonication. This practice involves buzzing next to flowers whose pollen is only released when there is a powerful air current next to their anthers so that pollen can be released to the adjacent female stigmas, facilitating pollination. Flowers that attract both honeybees and bumblebees include borage, salvias, sunflower, milkweed (Asclepius spp.), California native yarrow (Achillea millefolium), and lavender.

Last month, I mentioned in this column that our Los Angeles spring is characterized by the explosive bloom of yellow flowers on trees and shrubs. Allan Frank, who gardens in Valley Village, sent me photos of what is probably the most brilliant of all yellows you will find in the plant kingdom. It is found in the phosphorescent blooms of yellow trumpet tree (Handroanthus ochraceus or Tabebuia chrysotricha). He saw it flowering on the corner of Whitsett Avenue and Magnolia Boulevard in Valley Village, although it is no longer in bloom. This is a sparse, slow-growing tree that eventually reaches a height of 25 feet. It barely needs to be pruned and is immune to insect pests and diseases. For thousands of years, the native people of the Andes have made the inner bark of trumpet trees into a medicinal tea that is useful in fighting infections, shrinking tumors, numbing aches and pains, and strengthening the autoimmune system in general.

Today and tomorrow at the Los Angeles County Arboretum, the Geranium Society is putting on a show and sale. Many exotic geraniums will be on hand. Hours are 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. today and 8 a.m.- 3 a.m. tomorrow. Admission to the show is included with a general admission ticket to the arboretum, located at 301 North Baldwin Avenue in Arcadia. The Geranium Society meets once a month at the arboretum and welcomes anyone who would like to join. For more information, go to geraniumsociety.org.

California native of the week: Rocky Mountain or great yellow pond lily (Nuphar lutea) has a habitat that stretches from Alaska down to central California. The genus name Nuphar means water lily in Greek. Great yellow pond lily grows from rhizomes and has large leaves like any other water lily with one flower per leaf. The petals are held tightly together so that its flower, 2-4 four inches in diameter, resembles a tulip. Fruit is an edible capsule that has served as a source of carbohydrate for indigenous peoples of the Northwest. Nuphar lutea seeds and bare root plants are available at Etsy.com.

Do you have a pollinator plant to crow about? If so, send an email about it to Joshua@perfectplants.com. Your questions and comments as well as gardening conundrums and successes are always welcome.

​ Orange County Register