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  Dodgers star Mookie Betts heads for home as he runs the bases after hitting a solo home run during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow throws to the plate during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday afternoon at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The St. Louis Cardinals’ Paul Goldschmidt hits a single against the Dodgers during the first inning of a baseball game Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani looks on prior to his first at-bat during the first inning of a game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani swings at a pitch during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani hits a double during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani leaves the batter’s box after hitting a double during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. Ohtani was thrown out at third trying to extend the play. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, left, watches his double off of St. Louis Cardinals starting pitcher Miles Mikolas, right, during the first inning of their home opener on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani leaves the batter’s box after hitting a double during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. Ohtani was thrown out at third trying to extend the play. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani leaves the batter’s box after hitting a double during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. Ohtani was thrown out at third trying to extend the play. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani leaves the batter’s box after hitting a double during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. Ohtani was thrown out at third trying to extend the play. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani (17) is out at third base as teammate Mookie Betts occupies the base after Ohtani’s double during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. Ohtani was out trying to extend his double to a triple. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is greeted as he returns to the dugout after trying to extend his double into a triple during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Miles Mikolas of the St. Louis Cardinals pitches during the first inning of a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)

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  Dodgers star Freddie Freeman hits an RBI single during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Freddie Freeman hits an RBI single during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman hits an RBI single during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Freddie Freeman, center, watches his RBI single during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Mookie Betts is greeted as he returns to the dugout after scoring on an RBI single by Freddie Freeman (not pictured) during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The St. Louis Cardinals’ Nolan Arenado prepares to bat during the first inning of a baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow throws to the plate during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)

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  Dodgers star Mookie Betts watches the flight of his solo home run as he begins to run the bases during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The Dodgers’ Mookie Betts rounds the bases after hitting a home run against the St. Louis Cardinals during the third inning of a baseball game Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers star Mookie Betts points to the sky as he rounds second base after hitting a solo home run during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Mookie Betts celebrates as he runs the bases after hitting a one-run home run against pitcher Miles Mikolas #39 of the St. Louis Cardinals during the third inning on opening day at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

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  Dodgers star Mookie Betts rounds third base after hitting a solo home run during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The Dodgers’ Mookie Betts, right, is greeted by teammate Shohei Ohtani after hitting a solo home run during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani draws a walk during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman watches the flight of his two-run home run during the third inning of a baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers star Freddie Freeman watches the flight of his two-run home run as he runs the bases during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Freddie Freeman, top left, watches the flight of his two-run home run off of St. Louis Cardinals starting pitcher Miles Mikolas, not pictured, with teammate Shohei Ohtani, bottom right, during the third inning on opening day at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

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  Dodgers star Freddie Freeman, left, looks toward first base coach Clayton McCullough as he runs the bases after hitting a two-run home run The Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman hits an RBI single during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  St. Louis Cardinals starting pitcher Miles Mikolas stands on the mound as the Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman, background right, rounds the bases after hitting a two-run home run during the third inning of a baseball game Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers star Freddie Freeman, right, is congratulated by third base coach Dino Ebel as he runs the bases after hitting a two-run home run during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman, right, is greeted by teammate Shohei Ohtani after hitting a two-run home run during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday afternoon at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers won, 7-1. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/ SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, right, congratulates Freddie Freeman at home plate after his two-run home run during the third inning of a game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)

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  The Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman, right, is greeted by teammate Shohei Ohtani after hitting a two-run home run during the third inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday afternoon at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers won, 7-1. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/ SCNG)

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  Dodgers starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow throws to the plate during the first inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday afternoon at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The St. Louis Cardinals’ Paul Goldschmidt (46) celebrates his home run with teammates in the dugout during the fourth inning of a baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani walks to the batter’s box during the fifth inning of a baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  St. Louis Cardinals relief pitcher Andre Pallante, a former UC Irvine standout, throws to the plate during the fifth inning of a game against the Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani adjust his glove after hitting a single against the St. Louis Cardinals during the fifth inning of a baseball game Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Injured Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, left, and pitching coach Mark Prior watch from the dugout during the sixth inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers fans stand for the seventh inning stretch during the home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)

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  Dodgers star Mookie Betts reacts after being knocked down by a pitch from St. Louis Cardinals relief pitcher Riley O’Brien, not pictured, during the seventh inning of their home opener on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani reacts after an inside pitch from St. Louis Cardinals relief pitcher Riley O’Brien during the seventh inning of their home opener on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, left, watches from the dugout alongside Manager Dave Roberts during the eighth inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani looks on during his at-bat in the seventh inning of a game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)

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  The Dodgers’ Max Muncy watches his RBI single as he runs to first base during the seventh inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Mookie Betts congratulated in the dugout after scoring on a single by Max Muncy, not pictured, during the seventh inning of a game against the St. Louis Cardinals catches at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)

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  The Dodgers’ Jason Heyward hits during the eighth inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The Dodgers’ Jason Heyward hits during the eighth inning of their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts throws to first base during the eighth inning of a baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  The Dodgers’ Mookie Betts (50), Teoscar Hernandez (37), Miguel Rojas (11) and Kiké Hernández (8) celebrate the team’s 7-1 win against the St. Louis Cardinals in a baseball game Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, center, high-fives players as they celebrate the team’s 7-1 win against the St. Louis Cardinals in a baseball game Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Fans make their way through centerfield plaza prior to the Dodgers’ home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  A Dodgers fan wears a shirt referencing the team’s 1988 World Series title, left, as fans wear Shohei Ohtani jerseys prior to the team’s home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Fans make their way through centerfield plaza prior to the Dodgers’ home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Art and Terry Navarrette of El Sereno show off their Dodgers fandom prior to the team’s home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  A young Dodgers fan rests on her father’s shoulders prior to the Dodgers’ home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Fans make their way through centerfield plaza prior to the Dodgers’ home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  A fan dressed as Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, left, poses for pictures prior to the Dodgers’ home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  A Dodgers fan celebrates in costume prior to the team’s home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The grounds crew prepares the field prior to the Dodgers’ home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  The Dodgers’ Kike Hernandez is introduced prior their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is introduced before the team’s baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is introduced prior to their home opener against the Louis Cardinals on Thursday afternoon at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Fans watch as players warm up on the field before the Dodgers’ home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is introduced prior to their home opener against the Louis Cardinals on Thursday afternoon at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is introduced before the team’s baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani walks on the field during pre-game introductions before the team’s baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani (17) and starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto (18) shake hands during pre-game introductions before the team’s baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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  Dodgers players and coaches line up on the third base line for the national anthem before their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Former Dodgers great Adrian Beltre throws the ceremonial first pitch to injured Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw before the home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

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  A fan dressed as Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, left, poses for pictures prior to the Dodgers’ home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto throws in the bullpen before their home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals at Dodger Stadium on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

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  Art and Terry Navarrette of El Sereno show off their Dodgers fandom prior to the team’s home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

LOS ANGELES — If the Dodgers are playing “checkbook baseball,” opposing pitchers are going to find themselves paying the fees.

The top three in the Dodgers’ lineup – Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman – combined for five hits, including two home runs, drove in four runs and scored six as the Dodgers beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 7-1, in their first game of the season on Thursday afternoon at Dodger Stadium.

Three games into the season, Betts, Ohtani and Freeman have been on base 26 times, scored nine times and driven in 13 runs.

“I think in any discussion, you can argue that they’re the best hitter in baseball,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I think when you talk about those three guys and you lump up another handful or 10 players in baseball, they’re in that conversation. We’re fortunate to have three at the top of the order.

“Certainly, the first word that comes to mind is ‘daunting’ (for opposing pitchers) … when you look at those guys.”

The Cardinals’ season-opening starter, right-hander Miles Mikolas, criticized the Dodgers’ big-spending ways this offseason as “checkbook baseball” and said he hoped the collection of “Midwestern farmers” playing for the Cardinals could “stick it to the Dodgers.”

The big sticks at the top of the Dodgers’ lineup did the plowing against Mikolas.

The first four hitters reached base. Betts led off with a walk and went to third base when Ohtani doubled into the corner. Ohtani didn’t see third base coach Dino Ebel hold Betts at third and ran into the first out of the inning – one of only two Mikolas managed from the first third of the Dodgers’ order.

“I just kind of passed by the bag way too quicker than the lead runner so I wasn’t able to pick up Dino on time,” Ohtani said through his interpreter. “It’s a situation that I hadn’t encountered during spring training so I conferred with Dino and Mookie to make the adjustment.”

Ohtani’s foot speed and the expectation that he will be a more aggressive baserunner this season while not conserving energy to pitch was a topic of discussion during spring training. But he has run into two outs in three games so far. In the first game in Seoul, he was doubled off of first base on a fly ball.

“He can run very fast, but he’s got to understand there’s a guy in front of him, too,” Roberts said of Thursday’s mistake. “It was certainly a stand-up triple. But when you’ve got Freddie behind him, you don’t want to make that first out at home plate (by sending Betts). So you’ve got to keep your head up, too.”

Freeman singled in Betts and, after Will Smith singled, Freeman scored on a sacrifice fly by Max Muncy.

Betts led off the third inning with his second home run of the season (he homered in one of the two games in Seoul). Ohtani walked and Freeman dropped a two-run home run over the fence for a 5-0 getaway against Mikolas.

The top three purchases in the Dodgers’ lineup were 5 for 6 with two home runs and five runs scored before Mikolas headed back to the farm in the fifth inning.

“Everyone’s going to make a lot of it. I get it. But you got to give credit to Will, Max, everyone throughout the course of this lineup. We scored runs not just from us at the top,” Freeman said.

“It’s not just the top of the order. There’s nine guys in this lineup. I will deflect that for every single question from here on out. It is nine guys in this lineup. We did a good job today.”

There are nine guys in the lineup – but the first three have combined to score nine runs and drive in 13 in the first three games.

“I don’t know. It seems like we’re just up there doing our jobs, having fun and playing the game,” Betts said. “I think there’s been a lot of expectations on the outside, but internally nobody expects anything more than what Freddie, Mookie, Shohei and everybody down the lineup can do.”

Betts has done a lot. He walked again later in the game and has reached base in 11 of his first 15 plate appearances this season – four singles, a double, two home runs and four walks. He has already scored five runs and driven in eight in the Dodgers’ first three games – all while navigating a difficult position change.

“It’s impressive,” Roberts said. “I learned a lot last year from Mookie when he said that he really separates the offense from the defense. This is talking about going from right field to the dirt (the infield). He obviously had an MVP-caliber season last year, and so this is one of those things again that he just does a good job separating the defense from the offense.

“Clearly (shortstop is) the toughest position to handle on the defensive side, but to not have any drop-off offensively – he’s just a unique player.”

Ohtani has started his Dodgers career by going 5 for 13. Freeman is 3 for 9 with five walks.

“I was the only guy who couldn’t hit a homer,” Ohtani joked of the big three’s big day.

“Overall I had quality at-bats. The last at-bat I wanted to make sure Freddie got his last at-bat. That was something I wanted to do.”

In his second Opening Day start of the season, right-hander Tyler Glasnow gave up just two hits in six innings – both of them to Paul Goldschmidt, one a solo home run. Ryan Yarbrough followed with three scoreless innings.

“Pitching is what wins games and Glas and Yarbs, they were pretty spectacular today,” Freeman said, practicing his deflection once again.

Shohei Ohtani's first hit at Dodger Stadium as a Dodger! pic.twitter.com/x9OpzrWk2n

— MLB (@MLB) March 28, 2024

An #OpeningDay Mookie Mash. pic.twitter.com/MYAW68IRnb

— MLB (@MLB) March 28, 2024

Freddie's turn!

Freddie Freeman hits his first homer of the season. #OpeningDay pic.twitter.com/W4joqQocjN

— MLB (@MLB) March 28, 2024

"Our guys showed up today." Dave Roberts provides his takeaways from today's opener against the Cardinals. pic.twitter.com/0w3ArRhIWj

— SportsNet LA (@SportsNetLA) March 28, 2024

Shohei Ohtani spoke postgame to the media about his #OpeningDay experience at Dodger Stadium and the Big Three at the top of the order. pic.twitter.com/o2VTjrYjlY

— SportsNet LA (@SportsNetLA) March 28, 2024

NEW YORK  — Crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison for a massive fraud that unraveled with the collapse of FTX, once one of the world’s most popular platforms for exchanging digital currency.

Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted in November of fraud and conspiracy — a dramatic fall from a crest of success that included a Super Bowl advertisement and celebrity endorsements from stars like quarterback Tom Brady, basketball star Stephen Curry and comedian Larry David.

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan imposed the sentence in the same Manhattan courtroom where, four months ago, Bankman-Fried testified that his intention had been to revolutionize the emerging cryptocurrency market with his innovative and altruistic ideas, not to steal.

Kaplan said the sentence reflected “that there is a risk that this man will be in position to do something very bad in the future. And it’s not a trivial risk at all.” He added that it was “for the purpose of disabling him to the extent that can appropriately be done for a significant period of time.”

Kaplan further ordered Bankman-Fried to forfeit over $11 billion. He also he would advise the Federal Bureau of Prisons to send him to a medium-security prison or less near the San Francisco area because he’s unlikely to be a physical threat to other inmates or prison staff, and his autism and social awkwardness would make him vulnerable to other inmates in a high-security location.

Prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of 40 to 50 years.

“The defendant victimized tens of thousands of people and companies, across several continents, over a period of multiple years. He stole money from customers who entrusted it to him; he lied to investors; he sent fabricated documents to lenders; he pumped millions of dollars in illegal donations into our political system; and he bribed foreign officials. Each of these crimes is worthy of a lengthy sentence,” prosecutors said in a court filing.

Prosecutors said Bankman-Fried had cost customers, investors and lenders over $10 billion by misappropriating billions of dollars to fuel his quest for influence and dominance in the new industry, and had i llegally used money from FTX depositors to cover his expenses, which included purchasing luxury properties in the Caribbean, alleged bribes to Chinese officials and private planes.

Kaplan agreed with prosecutors Thursday that Bankman-Fried should not get leniency just because some investors and customers might get some of their lost money back. He called the argument “logically flawed” and “speculative.” He said customers lost about $8 billion, investors lost $1.7 billion and lenders were shorted by $1.3 billion.

Kaplan also cited three instances where he concluded that Bankman-Fried committed perjury during his trial testimony, including when Bankman-Fried testified that he didn’t know until just weeks before FTX collapsed into bankruptcy that customer funds were being diverted to a hedge fund offshoot of FTX.

Given a chance to speak, Bankman-Fried stood and apologized in a rambling statement, saying: “A lot of people feel really let down. And they were very let down. And I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about what happened at every stage.”

He added, “My useful life is probably over. It’s been over for a while now, from before my arrest.”

Defense lawyer Marc Mukasey said his client was misunderstood.

“Sam was not a ruthless financial serial killer who set out every morning to hurt people,” Mukasey said. “Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t make decisions with malice in his heart. He makes decisions with math in his head.”

Bankman-Fried’s attorneys, friends and family had urged leniency, saying he was unlikely to re-offend again. They also said FTX’s investors have largely recovered their funds — a claim disputed by bankruptcy lawyers, FTX and its creditors.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried continues to live a life of delusion,” wrote John Ray, the CEO of FTX who has been cleaning up the bankrupt company. “The ‘business’ he left on November 11, 2022 was neither solvent nor safe.”

Two weeks ago, Mukasey attacked a probation office recommendation of 100 years in prison, saying a sentence of that length would be “grotesque” and “barbaric.”

He urged the judge to sentence Bankman-Fried to a term of five to 6 1/2 years in prison, which Mukasey said was a fair reading of federal sentencing guidelines.

Bankman-Fried was worth billions of dollars on paper as the co-founder and CEO of FTX, which was the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world at one time.

FTX allowed investors to buy dozens of virtual currencies, from Bitcoin to more obscure ones like Shiba Inu Coin. Flush with billions of dollars of investors’ cash, Bankman-Fried took out a Super Bowl advertisement to promote his business and bought the naming rights to an arena in Miami.

But the collapse of cryptocurrency prices in 2022 took its toll on FTX, and ultimately led to its downfall. FTX’s hedge fund affiliate, known as Alameda Research, had bought billions of dollars of various crypto investments that lost considerable amounts of value in 2022. Bankman-Fried tried to plug the holes in Alameda’s balance sheet with FTX customer funds.

Three other people from Bankman-Fried’s inner circle pleaded guilty to related crimes and testified at his trial.

The biggest name among the three was Caroline Ellison, once the girlfriend of Bankman-Fried. Ellison described Bankman-Fried as a calculating individual who knew that he was likely committing crimes when he directed the use of customer funds. Two other onetime friends of Bankman-Fried, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, also testified they felt they were directed by Bankman-Fried to commit fraud.

The princess, who is 42 and married to the heir to the British throne, Prince William, described the diagnosis as a “huge shock” in the video, which was released two months after Kensington Palace said she had undergone surgery for a non-cancerous abdominal condition.

She said later tests found cancer, and her medical team advised her to undergo chemotherapy.

A message from Catherine, The Princess of Wales pic.twitter.com/5LQT1qGarK

— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) March 22, 2024

The video follows the recent release of a photo that showed a smiling, casually dressed Kate in jeans, seated on a chair on a patio outdoors, embracing her three children, Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, 9, and Prince Louis, 5, who are posed around her. The photo was accompanied by a message thanking the public for their “kind wishes and continued support over the last two months” and wishing “everyone a Happy Mother’s Day,” referring to the celebration of the holiday in the U.K.

She later acknowledged manipulating the image and in a statement from Kensington Palace apologized for the photo confusion.

“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” the future queen said. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C.”

OSO, Wash.  — After the mountainside collapsed, obliterating a neighborhood and 43 lives in the worst landslide disaster in U.S. history, Jessica Pzsonka made a promise -– to herself, to her bereft parents and to her late sister, who was buried along with two young sons, her husband and in-laws.

Pszonka would see a permanent memorial created where relatives and visitors could feel her sister’s presence and reflect on the serenity that drew the family to Oso, as well as the forces that left an immense scar in the forested Cascade Mountain foothills along the north fork of the Stillaguamish River, 55 miles (89 km) northeast of Seattle.

Ten years later, that memorial is complete, and Pszonka is leaving: She put her home up for sale and is moving, with her parents, to Texas.

“I need to get them out of here,” she said. “They cannot snap out of it. It’s like it happened yesterday, every day, when they drive by the school that the kids would have gone to.”

The trauma that engulfed Oso, a rural community of a couple hundred residents, on March 22, 2014, was a national wake-up call about the dangers of landslides. Washington state began hiring more staff and conducting more mapping to get a better handle on the risk, and it tightened guidelines on logging landslide-prone slopes amid concerns that clearcutting near the top of the scar might have helped cause the disaster.

Congress in 2020 adopted the National Landslides Preparedness Act to create a national strategy to identify, understand and protect against landslides — legislation pushed by lawmakers from Washington state, including Democratic Rep. Suzan DelBene.

“It was really hard for anyone to imagine how enormous the impact was — that you really had to be there to see that this side of a mountain collapsed into the valley and up the other side, wiping out an entire community,” DelBene said. “I personally wanted to do anything I could to make sure that a natural disaster like this did not become another national tragedy.”

Nevertheless, landslides are likely to afflict more and more people as climate change intensifies storms and wildfires, destabilizing soil. Predicting slides remains difficult, though some research projects have helped establish under what conditions certain types might occur.

In the years since Oso, post-wildfire landslides have become alarmingly frequent in California, where mudslides killed 23 people and destroyed hundreds of homes in Montecito in 2018.

More than 500 mudslides were recorded in Los Angeles alone after torrential downpours early this year; another destroyed a home last week.

Areas that have not burned have also suffered, such as the mountainous temperate rainforest of southeast Alaska, which has seen three deadly landslides on saturated slopes since 2015. The most recent killed six people in Wrangell last November.

Landslides occur throughout the U.S., including in the Southeast after hurricanes. But Brian Collins, a research civil engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey who helped study the Oso slide, noted that in the “steeper terrain of the Western U.S. and Alaska, they do tend to be and — as we’re seeing — there have been … certainly a number of devastating landslides in the past 10 years.”

None more so than Oso. It was 10:37 on a sunny Saturday morning following weeks of heavy rain when the hillside gave way in a scraping, crashing roar — some residents thought it was the Navy jets that often fly overhead. Some 19 million tons of sand and ancient glacial deposits — enough to cover 700 football fields 10 feet (3 meters) deep — raced across the river at an average speed of 40 mph (64 kph), hydroplaning on the saturated valley floor “kind of like an air hockey table,” Collins said.

The tsunami of sodden earth and pulverized timber slammed into Steelhead Haven, a subdivision of 35 homes. The highway running alongside was buried 20 feet (6.1 meters) deep.

There had been a history of landslides on the slope, including massive prehistoric slides. One in 2006 dammed the river, and before that, technical reports had warned about a potential “large catastrophic failure” and “significant risk to human lives and private property.” Officials considered buying up homes in the area to keep people out.

But even those reports did not suggest anything could happen on the order of what did occur. Residents said they had no idea of the danger; homes continued being built even after the 2006 slide. Washington state and the company that logged above the slope paid more than $70 million to settle lawsuits by the 2014 slide’s victims and their families.

It was the deadliest landslide in U.S. history, according to the National Science Foundation-backed geotechnical team that reviewed it. Nine people survived — including a mother and baby who were reunited in a hospital two weeks later.

Tim Ward lost his wife of 37 years, Brandy, and four of his five dogs. He described regaining consciousness 500 yards (457 meters) from where his house once stood, in a hole 15 feet (4.6 meters) deep, with an opening at the top the size of a kitchen saucer. Rescuers eventually pulled him out.

Many of the victims — retirees, grandparents, military veterans, office workers, young families — were simply at home on a weekend. Others just happened to be there: three contractors working on a house. Someone installing a satellite TV dish. A plumber servicing a hot-water tank.

Summer Raffo, 36, was driving on State Route 530 on her way to shoe a horse for a client. Seconds earlier or later, she would have been fine. Instead, the slide buried her, ripping the roof off her blue Subaru.

Raffo’s older brother, Dayn Brunner, was a tribal police officer at the time. His mother called him that day and said: “You’re her brother. You need to go find her.” He and his teenage sons went past police barricades and spent five days digging through the muck. When searchers finally found Raffo’s car, they called Brunner over to lift her body out. Her hands were still on the wheel. The speedometer read 60 mph (97 kmh).

In an extraordinary effort, teams that included 900 responders from near and far plus volunteers — firefighters and police, military members and local loggers — helped find every victim, often slogging through what they came to call “the pile” as rain fell. They would silence their chainsaws and other machinery whenever they discovered bodies. The last victim turned up that July, about three months after the official search ended.

Brunner, Pszonka and other family members spent years working on the memorial — holding fundraisers, lobbying lawmakers for money and attending planning committee meetings. They wanted to honor not just the lives lost, but the community response.

“We could be standing here and talking about that they never recovered my one nephew, who is one of the last ones” to be found, Pszonka said. “To those firefighters and search and rescue people and rescue dogs and all the people that promised that they would stay until every person was found, I will be forever grateful.”

Pszonka’s sister and her husband, Katie and Shane Ruthven, had a thriving glass-repair business. The boys, Hunter and Wyatt, ages 6 and 4, loved football. Pszonka and her parents got tattoos to help remember them by. But holidays, birthdays — any days — aren’t the same. So they’re leaving to get a fresh start, she said.

The $3.8 million memorial features large, curved metal panels by Seattle artist Tsovinar Muradyan for each family, with cut-out designs filled with colorful epoxy — butterflies for Pszonka’s nephews. Raffo’s includes a portrait of her along with her favorite horse.

Raffo was quiet and reserved, funny, dependable and an incredibly hard worker, Brunner said.

“Ever since Day 3, when the reality set in, I knew that I’m going to explain to everybody how special my sister was to me, to my mom, to my entire family, and let them know who the person she was,” Brunner said. “And doing this memorial is doing that for me.”

___

Bohrer reported from Juneau, Alaska.

That all changed on April 14, 2022. Jack had been sentenced to 32 months in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree burglary. After successfully petitioning to be paroled into the community, she just had to complete about three months at a state-funded reentry facility in El Monte known as Walden House and she’d be free.

Jack told her mother she loved the facility and the hints of freedom it offered — trips to the store, access to her phone and the small job she had helping out. She hoped to be reunited with her family in Louisiana soon.

Instead, Jack would be dead within months. She was 37.

In granting her the freedom she sought, the court released Jack into a public parole system so full of holes that Jack’s death was almost preordained, a review of thousands of pages of medical records and court documents reveals.

Jack was battling serious mental illness and coming off nearly a decade and a half of institutionalization. A psychologist for the state hospital warned that she “remains a danger” and was “psychiatrically and behaviorally unstable.” The Board of Parole Hearings denied Jack’s request to be freed.

Yet, after she appealed, a San Bernardino court released her from the state hospital’s care, meaning she couldn’t enter its outpatient program for people with mental illness. Instead, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sent Jack into a home focused on substance abuse to serve her parole.

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Left by state policy to navigate the complex mental and physical health care system on her own, Jack failed at nearly every turn. So did California’s parole system – and the contractors the Corrections Department paid with taxpayer money to operate it.

The state hospital discharged Jack with just 30 days of medication, giving her a month’s time to find a primary care doctor and psychiatrist in a new community and get her long list of prescriptions refilled.

When Jack did find a primary care physician, the medical records do not show that the doctor wrote her a new prescription for diabetes medication. The records do show that  tests revealed Jack’s blood glucose level had been nearly three times the normal range. Even when she did have prescriptions filled for her blood pressure, medical logs show that no one at Walden House recorded giving Jack her medication for many days at a time.

RELATED: Patton State Hospital Museum chronicles 125-plus years of the facility’s history

And when she ended up in the emergency room again and again, doctors sometimes attributed her physical complaints to mental illness and “drug-seeking behavior,” medical records show. By her last visit, she’d lost nearly 50 pounds in three months. When the hospital discharged her, records say she had no history of diabetes.

She died just 14 hours later. The cause: complications from Type 2 diabetes, according to the autopsy.

Sharon Jack, Fredreaka’s mother, received detailed updates from state hospital workers about Fredreaka’s mental health. But the autopsy report was the first she had heard of her daughter having diabetes, she said.

“I have never expressed to nobody how much this hurts,” Sharon said through tears. “I thought my baby was coming home to me. They took that opportunity away from me.”

As California has retooled the prison system to emphasize rehabilitation, it has invested more than $650 million in community-based reentry homes and facilities through a public program called Specialized Treatment for Optimized Programming. The program supports about 8,500 parolees a year.

To run the program, the Corrections Department relies on private companies and nonprofits, but a CalMatters investigation found that the program has grown with little oversight from the department.

The department agreed to pay the Amity Foundation roughly $121 million over five years to oversee and review reentry homes in Los Angeles County, including HealthRight 360’s Walden House, located just east of downtown Los Angeles in El Monte. However, state records show Amity didn’t review the facility in 2021 or 2022 – the year Jack died, even though its state contract required annual site visits and reports.

Taxpayers paid about $5,200 a month per parolee for Walden House to offer a mix of housing, food, substance use disorder treatment, therapy and various other activities.

Three years before Jack’s death, during an unannounced visit, a state inspector from the Department of Health Care Services, which licenses treatment centers such as Walden House, found the facility to be deficient in several areas — including ensuring residents’ medication logs were accurate. HealthRight 360 told the state it fixed the problem and retrained its staff, and the facility was given a clean bill of health by the state.

From 2020 to 2022, more than a third of the 85 medical emergency calls from the facility were related to someone experiencing blood sugar complications, according to emergency service call records from the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Neither the corrections department nor HealthRight 360 responded to questions about the calls.

HealthRight 360 closed Walden House in El Monte in 2023 because of a lack of demand, according to the corrections department, consolidating its operations with another location in Pomona. The company wouldn’t agree to an interview about Jack’s time at the facility.

HealthRight 360’s president and chief executive officer, Vitka Eisen, said in an email that the facility was licensed to provide residential treatment and detox. “All medical care, including primary care, and the prescribing of any medication would have been done via referral with a local community health center,” Eisen said.

The Amity Foundation declined an interview. “The Amity Foundation community is deeply, deeply saddened by the passing of Fredreaka Jack after being discharged from Greater El Monte Hospital,” wrote Chief Operating Officer Carmen Jacinto in a statement. “Our care team relies upon the professional medical expertise of hospitals who determine when a community member can be safely discharged into our care.”

In a statement, Corrections Department spokesperson Terri Hardy said parolees are responsible for their own health care once they enter the parole program.

“Individuals on parole are part of the community and access medical care as every other community member. CDCR does not oversee medical care for individuals on parole, nor does it monitor medication adherence for individuals housed in residential treatment programs as part of the Specialized Treatment for Optimized Programming (STOP) contracts,” Hardy wrote in response to CalMatters’ questions. “Neither CDCR nor STOP providers force an individual to disclose medical information, utilize services, or take medications.

“Providers may assist and/or encourage an individual to seek medical and mental health treatment; however, each participant is ultimately responsible for their own medical care.”

No institution said it had investigated Jack’s case or its policies or practices.

In a final stroke of indignity, Jack was cremated against her wishes since her family couldn’t afford to bury her. Her mother has been unable to make the trip from Louisiana to California to claim her ashes. If she doesn’t do so by Nov. 2025, Fredreaka Jack will be buried among other unclaimed people who died in Los Angeles County.

How Fredreaka Jack ended up in prison

A daughter of Metairie, La., Fredreaka Jack had beaten the odds.

She’d grown up where addiction was rampant and spent time in the foster care system. Still, Jack got her GED and tested into Loyola University New Orleans, her family said. Her aunt, Penny Jack, called her a “gifted” child.

Jack lived on campus and completed one semester of college before she withdrew in 2005. The once vibrant dancer and pianist became overwhelmed with voices in her head, giving way to delusions and behavior that tormented her family.

Jack’s great-uncle Derrek Bush, who took her in after she left Loyola, said he hung cans on the door with fishing string so he’d be alerted when she got home. “You had to watch yourself with her,” Bush said. “She was really sick.” He said Jack talked to caterpillars and had a history of vandalizing things while she lived on campus. He was afraid to live with her.

“I just started not coming home too much,” Bush said. Then one day, she was gone. “We went in the French Quarter. We couldn’t find her, and after that everything went dead.”

She made it to New York City. By 2007, she was in California.

Like so many people with severe mental health issues, Jack’s psychoses soon pushed her down California’s mental-health-to-criminal-justice pipeline.

Her laundry list of charges included disturbing the peace, burglary, resisting arrest and assault, among other crimes she frequently committed in San Diego and Los Angeles.

The court and the corrections department often deemed Jack too mentally ill to face trial or be paroled into the community. She went to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino for the first time in 2008. Patton provides mental health care to people admitted by a criminal or civil court order, current prisoners and others. State hospitals can hold people like Jack indefinitely if the Board of Parole Hearings deems them “offenders with mental disorders” and the state court finds that the person’s mental health doesn’t improve by the end of their sentence.

Nearly 10 years after Jack left Louisiana, her family got its first clue into her whereabouts. A Google search of her name turned up a lawsuit filed by Patton State Hospital to force Jack to take her psychotropic medication.

Penny tried calling the hospital to connect with her long-estranged niece. “They said ‘we can’t give you that information,’” Penny said.

State hospital officials told CalMatters that patient privacy laws prohibit them from confirming or denying whether someone is or ever was in a state mental hospital.

It was another dead end for her family.

“I think they should have looked for us,” Penny said. “If a person is that mental, something is wrong and they have family. No one looked at all.”

How the family finally found her

After six years, Jack was released from Patton in 2018.

Within months, she was in legal trouble again for assault, burglary and intimidating business operators or customers. She took a plea deal. And this time, she was sentenced to nearly three years in prison.

Even then, she was insisting on California transferring her to New Orleans, according to her medical records. “I was born there. My family is there. They have to let me go back,” Jack said, according to the prison therapist’s notes.

After she served her time in the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, officials transferred her back to Patton, making psychiatric treatment a condition of her parole.

This time, her sister found her — again  — in the state hospital. Her mother called.

Sharon Jack wasn’t sure that the person on the other line, who called herself Cleopatra, was her eldest daughter. It took weeks of conversations before Sharon was convinced that she was talking to her “baby.”

The two apologized for their estranged relationship, Sharon Jack said, and picked up where they’d left off after nearly 15 years of separation.

“We talked every day,” she said. “Early in the morning, I would make them go get her up!”

Their conversations, Sharon Jack said, oscillated between convincing her daughter to take her psychotropic medication, their plans to see each other and Fredreaka Jack’s frequent requests for money to purchase things from the commissary.

After all those years, Sharon Jack wanted to spoil her daughter. So she provided a credit card for Fredreaka’s ‘90s R&B CDs and her junk food cravings, even if it meant missing rent, she said. Little did she know, her daughter was taking Metformin to help regulate her blood sugar and was under doctor’s orders to diet and lose weight, as her medical records show.

A state hospital spokesperson told CalMatters that the hospital’s nutrition services department does not have “any control over patient’s commissary purchases” and that the hospital only reviews canteen orders “for appropriateness” when there’s a court order restricting a patient’s diet.

When Jack was in state prison, tests rendered her blood sugar within normal range, according to her medical records and the Centers for Disease Control’s scale for diabetes. Once she moved to Patton State Hospital, her blood-sugar levels began to increase, according to her medical records. Jack’s recent state hospital records first mention her high blood sugar on July 12, 2021. Soon after, she began taking Metformin to combat pre-diabetes, her medical records show.

The Board of Parole Hearings ordered her to receive psychiatric treatment at Patton. However, she made her own choices about her physical health care, including what she ate.

During her time at Patton State Hospital, Jack took her psychotropic medications religiously because it was required as a condition of her parole. But her medical records show she sometimes refused blood tests, ignored dieting advice and often refused to wear a breathing machine when she slept, against nurses’ advice.

“I don’t want it. It makes me wheeze,” Jack once told her nurse.

Life in Walden House

After nearly two years in custody and over a year inside Patton, Jack petitioned the court in 2022 to serve her parole in the community instead, according to the corrections department. Months prior, a psychologist for Patton noted that Jack was “psychiatrically and behaviorally unstable” and “remains a danger beyond that which can be safely and effectively monitored in a less restrictive setting,” according to her medical records. The psychologist determined that she was not ready to be released. The state’s Board of Parole Hearings recommended against her release on Jan. 31, 2022, according to the corrections department.

But Jack appealed, and a court granted her wishes. She was paroled into the STOP program and sent to Walden House, a 72-bed facility for women parolees and their children in El Monte.

About a month before her release, the corrections department changed its medication policy, giving people leaving prisons a 60-day supply. The policy change came after attorneys in a long-running prisoner-rights lawsuit known as Armstrong argued that parolees were often at risk of running out of medications because of “delays with setting up Medi-Cal” and the “lack of assistance from parole agents in navigating access to health care.”

But Jack slipped through the cracks. That new policy did not apply to prison parolees who were released from the state hospital.

“This does seem like a gap in the system,” said attorney Ben Bien-Kahn, who represents plaintiffs in the Armstrong lawsuit. “Absent some slip-up in the policy, if she released directly from CDCR prison, she would have had double the medication.”

State hospital officials said the hospital doesn’t give newly released patients refills on prescriptions because the patient “will no longer be monitored by the hospital physician,” the spokesperson wrote. “Unmonitored prescription medication use can be dangerous or even fatal.”

Instead, Jack left Patton State Hospital with a 30-day supply of her medications even though her stay at the STOP program’s Walden House would be at least three months. In discharge summaries, the hospital noted Jack’s “grandiose delusions” and medical risks for “diabetes, cardiovascular, respiratory, and endocrine.”

At Walden House, STOP residents could leave the compound for up to six hours for shopping, medical appointments, looking for a job and more.

For medical treatment, Walden House referred residents to two hospitals and the Southern California Medical Center, according to records from the Department of Health Care Services.

However, medication logs frequently did not document that Walden House staff gave Jack her medication. In her first weeks there, for example, employees documented her taking only half of her Metformin, which is used to treat pre-diabetes, for 11 days.

By mid-June, she was at Southern California Medical Center, a non-profit community clinic in El Monte, complaining of knee pain and seeking to have her medications refilled and adjusted, according to her medical records from the clinic.

Jack wanted to know what medications “she should continue and what should be stopped,” according to the medical records. The doctor noted that she had not taken her blood pressure medicine “for weeks.”

Records say she was given two new prescriptions for her blood pressure medications and the doctors ordered several lab tests for her, which revealed her glucose level was 395. The normal range: 60-140, according to the blood test included in Jack’s medical records.

SoCal Medical’s chief medical officer and founder, Dr. Mohammad Rasekhi, said it’s the company’s policy to call patients after receiving their test results. Jack’s records from SoCal Medical, where the Walden House referred its clients for medical care, do not mention that anyone contacted her about the results. The records say the clinic filled some of her prescriptions, but do not indicate that she got a new prescription for Metformin or any other medication to treat diabetes.

Rasekhi said he depends on places like Walden House to contact the clinic, which caters to low-income patients, about follow-up visits and medication changes.

“We did our best,” Rasekhi said.

In July, Walden House employees didn’t record giving her the new blood pressure medications for 10 days.

The records do not indicate that staff gave Jack 11 morning doses of Haloperidol, an antipsychotic that she was supposed to take twice a day. No one signed the log for giving Jack her morning dosage on the day she died.

Neither the Amity Foundation, HealthRight 360, nor the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation responded to CalMatters’ questions about why Jack’s medication logs were missing signatures.

Jack also frequently ended up at the Greater El Monte Hospital’s emergency room, where Walden House sent its clients, complaining about vaginitis – a potential symptom of diabetes – and various types of pain and discomfort. In July, she went to the emergency room four times in 11 days and dropped nine pounds in 10 days.

On her first of five ER visits, three days after tests at SoCal Medical revealed Jack’s high blood sugar, doctors at the emergency room also found a high amount of glucose in her urine, said Victor Lange, the hospital’s risk management director. Medical experts told CalMatters the high glucose could be a sign that someone has diabetes.

Jacks’ emergency room records don’t indicate that anyone drew her blood during her many visits to the emergency room. Lange said it’s not standard care to draw blood on every patient who visits the emergency room.

“If blood pressure is normal, blood oxygen, and all of these factors are aligning properly, the doctor doesn’t need to order a blood draw,” he said. However, on Jun. 18, 2022, Jack was given a urine test, which revealed that she had a high amount of glucose in her urine, Lange said. “We recommended that she see a primary care physician.”

Jack went back to SoCal Medical on July 1, 2022, as an “er follow up,” according to her medical records. The clinic counseled Jack on managing her diet and referred her to a gynecologist. The medical records do not indicate if anyone checked her blood sugar again or gave her a new prescription for medication to treat diabetes.

By July 11, 2022, she was back in the emergency room, complaining of vaginal pain and itching. The emergency room doctor wrote that his clinical impression was that Jack had vaginitis, drug-seeking behavior and a history of substance abuse, medical records show.

By July, she’d lost 48 pounds, a red flag for diabetes symptoms, according to several doctors CalMatters spoke with for this story.

Around July 20, she was complaining to her mother, Sharon, of left arm spasms, which she attributed to a side effect of her new psychiatric medication. At Sharon’s urging, Jack went back to the hospital.

The emergency room doctor referred Jack back to her psychiatrist.

“Patient did not appear to be a reliable historian and has delusional speech,” the medical records state.

“She has a history of schizoaffective disorder, and this is her 4th visit to this emergency room this month,” the emergency room physician said in the hospital’s records.

The doctor’s notes say that Jack didn’t have a history of diabetes. The records also do not indicate that the hospital checked her blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar, weight or temperature.

Emergency room records stated that there were “no vital signs available.”

Fourteen hours later, she was dead, according to the autopsy report.

On April 11, 2023, a SoCal Medical physician’s assistant reached out to Jack to schedule a follow up appointment for her hypertension, Rasekhi said.

She had been dead for almost nine months.

A mother searches for answers

As soon as Sharon Jack found out the cause from the autopsy report — diabetes complications — she blamed herself for giving Jack free rein at the commissary. And she blamed the state hospital for never telling her about Jack’s diabetes.

Sharon Jack realized she had been buying her daughter “all kinds of stuff a diabetic is not supposed to have.”

“I feel robbed,” she said. “It make me feel like I was killing my baby.”

Within weeks of Jack’s death, her sister, Frenada Jack, created a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for retrieving Fredreaka Jack’s body from the state and “put her to rest peacefully.”  “She would be so joyful being that she asked … not to be cremated and any donations will be fine and sincerely appreciated,” Frenada wrote.

The $10,000 campaign didn’t raise any money, and Jack was indeed cremated.

On a humid Louisiana afternoon in April 2023, nine months after Fredreaka Jack’s death, Sharon Jack was still searching for answers about what happened to her daughter. Inside her Metairie apartment, she rocked back and forth, sobbing and sweating as she stared at the small altar of mementos she created in honor of her daughter.

Sharon Jack pulled out stacks of papers and dozens of cards she’d received from people who lived in the facility with her daughter. “Rest in Peace you were like sunshine,” read one.

Six months after Jack’s death, Sharon’s only living daughter, Frenada, passed away too. Sharon created another altar, alongside Fredreaka’s.

“I’m so lonely. I gotta make it to heaven to see my two daughters again,” said Sharon through tears.

WASHINGTON — Eleven-year-old Domonic Davis was not far from his mom’s Cincinnati home when a hail of gunfire sprayed out from a passing car. Nearly two dozen rounds hurtled through the night at a group of children in the blink of an eye.

Four other children and a woman were hurt in the November shooting that killed Domonic, who had just made his school basketball team.

“What happened? How does this happen to an 11-year-old? He was only a few doors down,” his father, Issac Davis, said.

The shooting remains under investigation. But federal investigators believe the 22 shots could be fired off with lightning speed because the weapon had been illegally converted to fire like a machine gun.

Communities around the U.S. have seen shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years, fueled by a staggering increase in small pieces of metal or plastic made with a 3D printer or ordered online. Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of Prohibition-era gangsters. But the proliferation of devices known by nicknames such as Glock switches, auto sears and chips has allowed people to transform legal semi-automatic weapons into even more dangerous guns, helping fuel gun violence, police and federal authorities said.

“Police officers are facing down fully automatic weapon fire in amounts that haven’t existed in this country since the days of Al Capone and the Tommy gun,” said Steve Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF. “It’s a huge problem.”

The agency reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.

Guns with conversion devices have been used in several mass shootings, including one that left four dead at a Sweet Sixteen party in Alabama last year and another that left six people dead at a bar district in Sacramento, California, in 2022. In Houston, police officer William Jeffrey died in 2021 after being shot with a converted gun while serving a warrant. In cities such as Indianapolis, police have seized them every week.

The devices that can convert legal semi-automatic weapons can be made on a 3D printer in about 35 minutes or ordered from overseas online for less than $30. They’re also quick to install.

Once in place, they modify the gun’s machinery. Instead of firing one round each time the shooter squeezes the trigger, a semi-automatic weapon with a conversion device starts firing as soon as the trigger goes down and doesn’t stop until the shooter lets go or the weapon runs out of ammunition.

“You’re seeing them a lot in stunning numbers, particularly in street violence,” said David Pucino, deputy chief counsel at Giffords Law Center.

In a demonstration by ATF agents, the firing of a semi-automatic outfitted with a conversion device was nearly indistinguishable from an automatic weapon. Conversion devices with differing designs can fit a range of different guns, enabling guns to fire at a rate of 800 or more bullets per minute, according to the ATF.

“It takes two or three seconds to put in some of these devices into a firearm to make that firearm into a machine gun instantly,” Dettelbach said.

Between 2012 and 2016, police departments in the U.S. found 814 conversion devices and sent them to the ATF. That number grew to more than 5,400 between 2017 and 2021, according to the agency’s most recent data.

They took hold in Minneapolis in 2021, and helped fuel record-breaking gun violence that year, said police Chief Brian O’Hara. Along with spraying out bullets at a dizzying speed, switches make a gun much more difficult for the shooter to control, so more people can be hit by accident.

The city has seen a decline in their use since the September 2022 arrest of a man charged with selling switches that he had ordered from Russia and Taiwan or made himself, O’Hara said. But “it’s still a very, very real problem,” he said. “This is having a really deep impact on families, on neighborhoods and communities.”

While the devices are considered illegal machine guns under federal law, many states don’t have their own specific laws against them. In Indiana, police were finding them so often — multiple times a week in the state’s capital — that the state changed the law to ensure it included switches.

“We have to update the laws regarding machine guns to deal with the problems of today,” Indianapolis police Chief Chris Bailey said.

Only 15 states have their own laws against the possession, sale or manufacture of automatic-fire weapons, according to Giffords. Indiana was one of many states that have regulations with exceptions. Five states have no state-level machine-gun regulations at all.

But long before any prosecution, police have to find the conversion devices. Often about the size of a quarter, they can easily go unnoticed by the untrained eye after being installed, said Dettelbach.

He recalled visiting a Texas police department after the ATF hosted a training on conversion devices. Afterwards, the chief searched the weapons in the evidence room and found several with previously undetected conversion devices.

“These items don’t always look as dangerous as they are,” he said. “If you see some of them, they’re pieces of plastic and metal, and sometimes it’s even hard to recognize them when they’re actually on or in the firearm because they blend in.”

They’re also increasingly a fixture online, in social media and rap lyrics, Davis said. “Everyone is talking about switches,” he said. “It’s a scary trend.”

Davis struggles to talk about the loss of his son. Domonic would often come with his dad on Fridays to get a haircut at the barber shop where Issac Davis works. The shooting also fell on a Friday, making the end of the week an especially tough time.

Davis hopes to start a foundation called For Every Eleven to fight gun violence and honor his son’s memory.

“I still want to keep his name going,” he said. “He deserved to be still relevant. So I have to keep going. No matter how much grief I grieve him in private.”

Millions of Americans who have dropped pounds and boosted their health using popular obesity drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are facing a new dilemma: What happens if they stop taking them?

Many worry, rightly, that they’ll regain weight and revert to old habits. In clinical trials, patients who paused the drugs put back on most of the weight they lost.

But others are gambling on a do-it-yourself strategy to ease off the drugs and stay slim by stretching out doses, taking the medication intermittently or stopping and starting again only if needed.

“To me, it’s a help, it’s an aid,” said Donna Cooper, 62, of Front Royal, Virginia, who lost nearly 40 pounds in nine months using Wegovy along with diet and exercise. “At some point you have to come off of them. I don’t want to be on them forever.”

More than 3 million prescriptions for the new medications are dispensed each month in the U.S., according to recent data from the health technology company IQVIA. They include semaglutide, the drug in Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, the drug in Mounjaro and Zepbound.

But many people don’t stick with it. One recent study published in the journal Obesity found that just 40% of patients who filled a prescription for Wegovy in 2021 or 2022 were still taking it a year later.

Doctors who treat obesity stress that the disease is a chronic condition that must be managed indefinitely, like heart disease or high blood pressure. The new injection drugs work by mimicking hormones in the gut and the brain to regulate appetite and feelings of fullness. They were designed — and tested — to be taken continuously, experts said.

“We are not an injection shop,” said Dr. Andres Acosta, an obesity researcher and medical adviser at the Mayo Clinic. “I don’t think they should be used in intermittent fashion. It’s not approved for that. They don’t work like that.”

Despite that directive, some patients who achieved their health and weight goals with the drugs are looking for an off-ramp, said Dr. Amy Rothberg, a University of Michigan endocrinologist who directs a weight-management and diabetes treatment program.

“Many of them want to step down or de-escalate their dose,” she said. “And they’re also wanting to ultimately discontinue the medication.”

TAKING ‘A BREATHER’

The reasons for pausing the drugs can vary, said Dr. Katherine Saunders, an obesity expert at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-founder of the obesity treatment company Intellihealth. Some patients don’t like side effects such as nausea and constipation. Others want to stop for holidays or special occasions — or just because they don’t want to take the weekly shots indefinitely.

One of Saunders’ patients, a 53-year-old New York man, lost 70 pounds last year using Mounjaro. He told Saunders he wanted to take “a breather” from the medication to see how his body reacted. On her advice, he has been stretching out injections to every 10 days or two weeks, instead of weekly, since December.

Other patients have been forced to ration or halt doses because the drugs are costly — $1,000 to $1,300 per month — and insurance coverage varies or because demand has far outstripped supply, Rothberg noted.

“It’s being imposed on them,” she said. “By necessity they have to go off the medication and kind of figure it out.”

But hoping the drugs’ benefits will last even after stopping them ignores the fundamental biology of obesity, experts said. The disease affects the way the body processes and stores energy, causing it to accumulate weight. The new drugs alter that process and when patients stop, the disease returns, often with a vengeance.

Many people dropping off the medications report a sharp rise in symptoms of obesity. They include so-called food noise or intrusive thoughts of food; raging hunger; and decreased feelings of fullness when they eat.

“These drugs are just a super-suppressor of these native signals,” Rothberg said. “And we should expect that’s going to occur.”

Tara Rothenhoefer, 48, of Trinity, Florida, lost more than 200 pounds after joining a clinical trial for Mounjaro nearly four years ago. She now takes the lowest dose of the drug every four to eight weeks, but she worries when her weight fluctuates by a few pounds.

“It scares the daylights out of me to see the numbers on the scale going up,” she said.

Some patients who stop the drugs and start again find they can’t tolerate the medication, winding up with severe gastrointestinal side effects, Acosta said. Others find the drugs don’t work as well when they restart them, Saunders added. But there’s no data on the long-term effects of intermittent use.

“I don’t think it’s a strategy that will work for most individuals, but it could be an option for select patients,” Saunders said.

Donna Cooper has heard that people gain back weight when they stop the drugs, but she hopes to be an exception. She’s on her last box of Wegovy injections. Once she’s done, Cooper said she’ll just continue with a strict diet and exercise plan.

“I just needed a crutch to get everything back in order,” said Cooper, who has gone from a size 16 to a size 10. “And I am excited to be done.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

SAN FRANCISCO — After two false starts, the billionaires behind a plan to build an eco-friendly city from scratch are behind schedule to put their proposal before California voters this November.

Former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek unveiled his closely guarded ballot initiative for the proposed community between San Francisco and Sacramento in January, a plan that envisions 20,000 homes, transit infrastructure, schools, jobs and green space for an initial 50,000 residents. He has since amended it twice to address concerns raised by Solano County and a neighboring U.S. Air Force base.

The county counsel’s office issued a ballot title and summary for the initiative Thursday, allowing signature gatherers to hit the streets in search of the 13,000 they need — and preferably thousands more as a cushion. The delays mean the campaign has just two months, not three, to collect signatures if they want to give elections officials the maximum time to verify them.

“You get into this math game of time and availability of people to sign your petition,” said Jim Ross, a veteran Democratic political consultant based in Oakland. “Losing a month is a big deal.”

But Brian Brokaw, a spokesperson for the campaign, said he is confident about making the Nov. 5 ballot.

“We’ve been walking a line of making sure we get this right and also realizing that the clock is ticking,” he said. “At the same time, we believe that the amendments that we made to the measure will significantly help increase our chances of success in November, and it was definitely worth the additional time that it cost us to get it right.”

Sramek needs Solano County voters to allow urban development on rural land his company has stealthily purchased since 2018 for at least $800 million to build what he’s pitched as a walkable community for up to 400,000 residents with a cute downtown, good-paying jobs and affordable homes. The state desperately needs more housing, especially affordable units.

Sramek has not said how much he’s prepared to spend on the effort. His California Forever company can count on the deep pockets of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, including philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

But lots of money doesn’t always translate to ballot success — in 2022, California voters rejected two efforts to expand gambling despite at least $460 million spent by supporters.

Critics say the delays are on par for an unorthodox campaign that operated in secrecy for years, eschewed local input and now wants to break ground on agricultural land voters chose to protect from urbanization back in 1984.

“What we see from that is a bit of oversight in their process of actually engaging folks,” said Sadie Wilson, planning and research director at Greenbelt Alliance. The environmental advocacy group is part of Solano Together, a coalition that includes farming and open space interests and environmental groups.

Opponents of the plan say it makes flashy promises but is shockingly light on details.

The sustainable way to build more housing is within existing city limits, Wilson said, rather than plunking an enormous development on 27 square miles (70 square kilometers) of land in a county of 450,000 people with sensitive ecosystems and an already strained water supply.

Locals had wondered for years who had snapped up parcels containing cattle and wind farms. They were stunned to learn last summer that Sramek and his Silicon Valley investors wanted it for a new development — not yet named — that could become a city or remain part of the county.

Sramek then went on something of an apology tour, including meeting with two irate congressmen who had sought for years to find out whether foreign adversaries or investors were behind the land purchases between Travis Air Force Base and the Sacramento River Delta city of Rio Vista. Reps. John Garamendi and Mike Thompson still oppose the project.

In January, Sramek held a news conference to outline the ballot initiative, filed it with the county elections office and then withdrew it — all on the same day — after county officials requested language clarifying the process.

California Forever could have avoided this had the campaign shared its proposal with local officials ahead of time, said Ross, the consultant. “It’s very much an outsider approach,” he said.

Bernadette Curry, counsel for Solano County, said officials asked for technical changes to clarify that the county had discretion to approve a development agreement with the company before it can build. Previously the initiative contained language requiring approval by the county supervisors.

The initiative specifies that the development agreement will include the 10 guarantees made by California Forever, such as $400 million to help county residents and Travis Air Force Base families buy homes in the community and $200 million for the county’s existing downtowns. An environmental impact review would also be required.

The campaign withdrew its initiative again after base officials raised concerns including its ability to conduct flight operations. The revised initiative establishes a larger buffer area between the development and the base.

There is no firm deadline for submitting signatures, said John Gardner, the county’s assistant registrar of voters. But the Solano County Board of Supervisors has only until Aug. 8 to approve its inclusion on the ballot, and elections officials have between 30 and 90 days to verify signatures.

That 90-day window means the campaign would need to submit its paperwork by early May.

Wilson, of Solano Together, said the approach taken by California Forever raises national questions about how decisions are made about development, farmland and climate resilience — and who gets to circumvent the rules.

“This really deserves greater attention because of the wave this brings,” she said, “and the precedent that it could set for other places around the country.”