Child pornography arrest for Vallejo man who served four decades for murder
A Vallejo man who served 41 years in prison for murdering a 13-year-old girl and whose experience inspired a feature-length documentary has been arrested on suspicion of possessing child pornography, drugs and a firearm.
Deputies raided Marvin Mutch's home Thursday in connection with a child pornography investigation, according to a news release from the Solano County Sheriff's Office.
Mutch, 68, was previously convicted in the 1975 Union City murder of 13-year-old Cassie Riley and served 41 years of a life without parole sentence, though he always denied any connection to the crime. He was granted parole in 2016.
After his release, he became the subject of KQED News' first feature-length digital documentary, ' The Trials of Marvin Mutch, ' which is part profile, part detective story and part exposé.
Mutch spent much of his time advocating for incarcerated inmates, appearing in Chronicle stories about prison suicide after a friend at San Quentin State Prison killed himself.
After his arrest Thursday, Mutch was taken to a local hospital because of an ongoing medical condition and remains in custody, Sgt. Rexall Hawkins said. Mutch is set to be booked into Solano County Jail on three weapons charges, a charge of possessing child pornography and a drug charge.
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San Francisco Chronicle
3 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Traffic tickets are up 50% in San Francisco. These are the most common violations
The number of traffic tickets issued by San Francisco police continued climbing upward in the first four months of 2025, according to police data — though SFPD still issues only a fraction of the tickets they did before 2020. Compared to the same period last year, tickets were up nearly 50% in the first four months of 2025, a Chronicle analysis found, building on increases in early 2024. Just under half of the violations this year were in the 'Focus on Five' category, which includes the infractions most likely to cause a collision: speeding, running red lights and stop signs, failing to yield while turning and failing to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk. Despite the increase, traffic tickets are still a long way from what they were in years past. Traffic enforcement plummeted with the onset of the pandemic shutdowns in 2020 and stayed low the next three years — hitting a low of less than 200 tickets in June of 2022. By contrast, police issued more than 3,000 tickets in June of 2019. In June of 2015, they issued more than 10,000. The stunning and sustained drop prompted outcry from safety advocates and citizens worried that police had begun to ignore a key responsibility, especially as the city struggled to meet its Vision Zero goal of eliminating traffic deaths on its streets. Concerned about the enforcement decline and increasing street fatalities, Supervisor Rafael Mandelman called for police to increase enforcement once more, holding four hearings on the issue between October 2022 and December 2024. In those hearings, police pointed to a number of interconnected reasons behind the drop, including a lack of staff in the traffic division and a 2015 state law that requires officers to carefully document whom they stop to guard against racial profiling, which makes each stop take longer. But police traffic commander Nicole Jones acknowledged in a hearing in December that these changes could not fully explain the precipitous decline. She noted that the pandemic had shifted the department's priorities away from traffic enforcement. While traffic citations had been increasing in the first half of 2024, they dipped again in the second half. Jones said in the hearing that she was hopeful that a bevy of new strategies rolled out over the last year would help. Since then, the numbers have fluctuated monthly but trended back up. Those new strategies include targeted enforcement in problem areas, including having high-visibility officers at intersections to deter bad behavior, training officers not assigned to the traffic unit to use lidar for speed detection and flooding resources to certain areas at different times. Evan Sernoffsky, a spokesperson for the department, said that such strategies enable the department to 'maximize' its resources, even amid a yearslong staffing shortage. He said that traffic safety was a 'top priority' for the department. 'We are taking a very rigorous and data-driven approach to have the maximum impact,' Sernoffsky said. 'At the end of the day, we just want to make sure that our streets are safe for everybody.' Asked whether it was possible for citations to reach pre-pandemic levels, Sernoffsky said that the department's goal is to continue increasing enforcement through citations as well as by having officers visible on the street and issuing warnings for deterrence. In the December hearing, Jones noted another factor that would help bolster street safety, and one not captured in police data: automated enforcement. The city's 19 red light cameras already issue thousands of tickets a year, and its 33 new speed cameras will also begin issuing citations as early as August. The cameras have already begun issuing warnings, and, in April, logged almost 32,000 speeders
San Francisco Chronicle
4 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
California AG says federal cuts are actually helping legal fight with Trump: ‘They can't keep up'
WASHINGTON — Democratic attorneys general fighting the Trump administration on an array of policy issues are seizing on the widespread cuts and resignations of federal employees, an effort that may be coming back to bite the White House. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, buoyed by $25 million from a special legislative session, has been hiring new staff — including some of those former federal employees, he told the Chronicle while in Washington, D.C., to hear Supreme Court arguments in a case the state is party to. While Bonta and other state attorneys have been strategically preparing for prolonged legal battles against the administration, federal cuts have left the U.S. Justice Department without enough staff to handle its workload. More than half the attorneys at the Justice Department's civil rights division, led by San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon, have left, the Wall Street Journal reported. And in some cases, Bonta said, U.S. attorneys — district prosecutors — have appeared on the Trump administration's behalf instead of lawyers from the main Justice Department. 'Their own strategy of 'flood the zone' — and the confusion and chaos and shock and awe — has almost this boomerang effect, where we've responded and the ball's back in their court now and they can't keep up,' Bonta said. 'This speed and this volume has repercussions on their ability to defend themselves.' During the first Trump administration, then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra brought or was party to 110 cases, according to a CalMatters database. The state won 82% of the 28 cases that reached a final verdict. This go-round, Bonta has already brought or is party to 22 cases and won injunctions against the administration in nine. The volume of cases is 'double the speed, double the pace,' compared to the first Trump administration, Bonta said. At the current rate, 'we will hit the number of total cases of Trump 1.0 by the (2026) midterms.' 'We're doing everything faster and with more volume in a broader variety of cases, more nuance, more issues,' he said. 'So we're just more proficient at it … including working together and filing more quickly, being more responsive to the actions.' That includes coordination among state attorneys. 'More bodies and more talent is going to help us. We've learned as Democratic AGs how to marshal resources together and share those resources, and deploy them strategically and efficiently,' Bonta said. The first Trump administration was a period of discovery for state attorneys general, who were figuring out how they could use their authority, he said. This time, the top state lawyers were more prepared and began sharing resources over a year before Trump took office. During the first month of Trump's current term, 23 Democratic state attorneys general held a daily video chat to coordinate their efforts, Politico reported. They strategized over which courts to file cases, whether to seek state or federal venues and how to prove sufficient harm to be heard in court. Bonta told Politico he preemptively drafted challenges to potential actions from a second Trump administration, particularly focusing on ideas from Project 2025. Although the final verdict in many of these cases could come from the Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative majority includes three Trump appointees, Bonta appeared confident that the state would prevail in several key cases. The state has primarily faced pushback on jurisdictional issues. A U.S. District Court judge hearing the state's challenge to Trump's tariffs suggested it should be heard in the U.S. Court of International Trade instead. In the state's suit over the termination of teacher preparation grants, the Supreme Court ruled that the case was a contractual dispute and needed to be heard in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims rather than a District Court. UC Davis law professor Aaron Tang argued that ruling was effectively the Supreme Court trying to give Trump a win, without actually letting him win by not ruling on the merits of the case. Bonta said the cases that pose the biggest financial risk to California involve the administration's massive import tariffs and its efforts to withhold congressionally appropriated funding from states — which make up about half of the cases he has brought. Trump's proposed tariffs would be 'massively damaging,' to California, he said. 'We're the largest state — nearly 40 million people — fourth largest economy in the world now, largest importer of any state, second largest exporter, biggest manufacturer, largest agricultural exporter,' Bonta said. 'An outsized economy means an outsized impact on California of the tariffs.' Federal funding freezes or cuts are also of huge concern, Bonta said. The second case he brought was against the administration's efforts to freeze all federal grant funding, which would have left a $168 billion gap in California's budget, at a time when the state is facing an enormous deficit. The two cases Bonta said pose the biggest social risks are the administration's effort to revoke birthright citizenship — which was the reason Bonta had traveled to Washington, D.C. — and to force states to require proof of citizenship to vote while prohibiting states from counting ballots received after election day. He said he's confident the states will win the birthright citizenship case because 'it's a deprivation of a constitutional right by our own federal government, and it's so clear and so blatant.'
San Francisco Chronicle
5 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
What caused a deadly crash in San Francisco — a ‘madman' driver or a ‘malfunctioning' Tesla?
The Tesla hurtled down the Interstate 280 offramp to Sixth Street, sideswiping three vehicles along the way. It picked up speed, running red lights and nearly touching 90 mph as it raced northwest toward downtown San Francisco. At Sixth and Harrison, the Tesla Model Y slammed into a Lexus at a stoplight, then spun into oncoming traffic. Seven people were injured, one of whom described the impact of the crash as an explosion. The driver of the Lexus, San Francisco resident Mikhael Romanenko, was killed. Witnesses would later describe the car to police as a 'black blur' and the driver 'a madman,' according to a police report. But as the Tesla's driver, Jia Lin Zheng, 66, was being treated for his own injuries in the wake of the Jan. 19 crash, he offered a chilling explanation: The car, he told police, had accelerated on its own. 'The Tesla malfunctioned and began to speed up' as he exited the highway, San Francisco police wrote in a report, describing Zheng's account. 'Zheng stated every time he stepped on the brake of the Tesla, he felt the car accelerate.' Drivers have reported incidents of what is known as sudden unintended acceleration for decades, and for an array of vehicle makes and models. While the accelerations can be triggered by a mechanical defect or electrical failure, they can also be the result of driver error, such as mistaking the gas and brake pedals. But the claim by Zheng — who has a history of speeding tickets, records show — echoed those of a long line of Tesla drivers, who over the last several years have reported the cars jolting forward or backward on their own. Tesla has issued few public statements on the issue, and it did not respond to the Chronicle's requests for comment for this story. But in a 2020 blog post, recent legal filings and communications with customers, the company has largely maintained that the incidents were caused by driver error, an assertion supported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Following a review of nearly 250 sudden unintended acceleration claims in Teslas, the agency in 2021 published a report finding no evidence of a design factor or electrical issue with the vehicles that would cause the alleged problems. Yet, claims like Zheng's following the deadly San Francisco crash have continued accruing, with people alleging in NHTSA complaints, media interviews and social media posts that their Teslas accelerated on their own. The question remains: Is there an undiagnosed problem in some battery-driven cars featuring advanced driver-assist systems, or are the cars' drivers looking for high-tech excuses for accidentally punching the gas? NHTSA is now weighing another petition to investigate and potentially recall Tesla cars over the alleged sudden unintended acceleration problems, based on newly obtained information on the car's electrical system. The results could have weighty implications for Tesla and for the untold number of drivers who, like Zheng, face costly damage fees, lawsuits or even prison time for crashes they swear they didn't cause. A violent wreck In the moments before his death, Romanenko, his girlfriend, Linh Luu, and her 8-year-old dog were on their way to pick up Luu's family members for a trip to the airport, she said. When the Tesla smashed into the couple's car at Sixth and Harrison streets, the impact thrust their vehicle forward into an unoccupied Waymo robotaxi and several other vehicles, and sent the Tesla spiraling into a truck on the other side of the street, according to police reports. Romanenko was killed almost instantly as one side of the Lexus was torn off. Luu was hospitalized with broken bones and her dog, Keeper, was pronounced dead at the scene. Seven people from six other vehicles were injured. Police arrested Zheng on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter, but city prosecutors have not made a decision on whether to charge him. According to a police report, Zheng — whose attorney declined to comment for this story — had no alcohol in his system and his vitals suggested he hadn't recently suffered from a medical episode. Anna Dubrovsky, an attorney for Romanenko's mother, Julia Romanenko, filed a wrongful death lawsuit May 21 against Zheng in San Francisco Superior Court. Zheng and his relatives had not been officially served the lawsuit as of Friday evening, Romanenko's attorneys said. The defendants declined to comment. The suit, which seeks unspecified damages, also names Zheng's son and daughter-in-law, saying they owned the Tesla and were 'well aware of Jia Lin Zheng's tendency to drive dangerously, and at a high rate of speed, without any regard for traffic signals.' Zheng's history of traffic incidents in his home state of Hawaii include five citations for speeding, records show. Other infractions included allegedly running a red light and disobeying a traffic control sign. 'This gentleman is clearly ignoring the rules of the road and endangering people,' Dubrovsky said in an interview. That the car was a Tesla may or may not factor into the criminal investigation and lawsuit, as drivers who blame their cars for their crashes are often treated skeptically. In San Francisco, an 80-year-old woman is facing both a wrongful death lawsuit and criminal charges of felony vehicular manslaughter following a West Portal crash in March 2024 that killed a family of four, including two young children. Mary Fong Lau allegedly drove her Mercedes sport utility vehicle at high speed into an oncoming lane of traffic and then slammed into a transit shelter. Police said investigators who looked at 'every aspect' of the case couldn't find evidence that the car malfunctioned. Long-running dispute But Lau wasn't driving a Tesla. Beginning in the 2010s, high-profile allegations of sudden unintended accelerations in the company's vehicles began cropping up around the country, often covered by local news stations when the cars rammed into nail salons, gas stations and garages. Following a 2019 petition to investigate the matter and issue a recall, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigations reviewed 246 complaints made to the agency of sudden unintended acceleration — sometimes abbreviated as SUA — filed for Tesla models 3, S and X since 2013, 203 of which involved crashes. Tesla called the petition 'completely false,' stressing that the person who filed it was a short-seller of the company's stock. 'We investigate every single incident where the driver alleges to us that their vehicle accelerated contrary to their input, and in every case where we had the vehicle's data, we confirmed that the car operated as designed,' the company said in a 2020 blog. 'In other words, the car accelerates if, and only if, the driver told it to do so, and it slows or stops when the driver applies the brake.' Federal officials largely echoed this sentiment a year later after completing their review, maintaining that drivers were to blame. 'In every instance in which event data was available for review by ODI (the Office of Defects Investigations), the evidence shows that SUA crashes in the complaints cited by the petitioner have been caused by pedal misapplication,' the agency wrote in 2021. In many of the incidents reviewed by NHTSA, the car recorded that accelerators were depressed at or near 100%. Some Tesla owners and their lawyers, though, assert that a car's record of a depressed accelerator doesn't necessarily mean it was pushed down by the driver. 'Tesla takes the position that when the data shows 100% acceleration, that must mean the driver was pushing on the acceleration pedal with 100% force,' said attorney Todd Walburg, who represented family members of a Tesla driver who was killed four years ago in Ohio in what they alleged to be a crash caused by sudden unintended acceleration. 'In our view, when the 100% acceleration occurs in a situation that it just doesn't make sense,' Walburg said, 'it's more likely than not evidence of a malfunction.' In some cases, those who allege sudden unintended acceleration in Teslas contact the company directly. Tesla's response often comes as a phone call along with a letter, altered case by case to describe the specific amount of force the company says was used by the driver, according to documents posted on NHTSA's website. 'Based on this review, Tesla determined that the vehicle operated without fault and that the accelerator pedal was manually pressed by the driver immediately prior to the incident,' one letter stated. Some drivers remain unconvinced. 'Does not make logical sense that the car could accelerate 87% in a matter of 2 feet!' one Model S driver wrote in her complaint to NHTSA. 'I am 150% sure I did not hit the accelerator. I am (not someone) who may have pedal confusion.' Another: 'I contacted Tesla and was told I step on the gas 100% in under 2 second[s], and they would not claim responsibility. As I tell them I am 100% sure I did not step on anything 100% (gas or brake) when I am in a busy parking lot. They still denied and said it was my fault.' Mystery settlement Last month, as San Francisco authorities continued investigating the Sixth Street crash, Tesla attorneys signed off on what experts said may be the company's first settlement of a wrongful death lawsuit claiming sudden unintended acceleration in one of its vehicles, according to court records. While the terms of the settlement are unknown, as is whether the company accepted fault, some observers interpreted the agreement as a concession by Tesla, citing CEO Elon Musk's 2022 statement on the platform now known as X that the carmaker would 'never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose.' The suit stemmed from a fatal 2021 crash in Jeffersonville, Ohio. After passing through an intersection, Clyde Leach's Tesla Model Y hopped a curb and slammed into a gas station pillar, igniting a fire. Leach's estate alleged that the crash was due to sudden unintended acceleration, and that Tesla knew about the problem and failed to warn its customers. Tesla's attorneys maintained that Leach floored the car's accelerator. The settlement ended months of litigation over whether Tesla should be forced to turn over documents the company deemed confidential. Walburg, who represented Leach's estate, said he could not comment on the settlement or even its existence. And while Tesla has settled few cases in court, it remains unclear how claims of sudden unintended acceleration have fared in private arbitration that the company uses by contract in many disputes with customers. In the past, other car companies have acknowledged problems with sudden unintended acceleration, but these cases have generally involved physical flaws with pedals and floor mats that prompt a pedal to stay depressed. Andrew McDevitt, a San Francisco attorney who has filed lawsuits against Tesla, said it's possible that some alleged incidents of sudden unintended acceleration were caused by a mix of design flaws and user error. An uninitiated Tesla driver, he said, may accidentally activate some of the car's driver-assist features, such as cruise control. The bigger mystery, McDevitt asserted, surrounds the incidents that drivers believe are caused by an electrical malfunction, even as Tesla and the government see human error. 'The (question) most people are focused on is what would be the electrical explanation, where it truly is spontaneous,' McDevitt said. 'You didn't accidentally push the wrong lever, you didn't accidentally push the pedal, but the car took off.' Claims persist In the years following NHTSA's January 2021 report clearing Tesla of defects, at least 270 other complaints have been filed with the regulatory agency alleging that the company's vehicles accelerated without a driver's input, according to a Chronicle review of materials on the department's website. Many of the claims involved accidents; at least two resulted in a fatality. The information provided in the reports is often limited, though a few patterns emerge. Most of the complainants, for instance, said the events occurred while the cars were moving slowly, such as in parking lots or while pulling into garages. Others, however, made claims similar to those in the San Francisco case, saying they lost control while on the highway and that the brake pedal seemed to make the car go faster. Complaining parties include drivers who said they were using driver-assist modes including Autopilot, which steers the vehicle and controls its speed, as well as those who weren't. One San Jose woman said that while she was driving at about 65 mph, with Autopilot engaged, she pushed the brake pedal only to have the vehicle speed up, while the steering wheel became difficult to turn. After steering left to avoid a rear-end crash, she said, 'the vehicle's front end had crashed into the divider wall and the vehicle ricocheted across four lanes of traffic and ran off the roadway.' The woman was hospitalized with fractures to her spine and ribs. Two years ago, NHTSA agreed to take a second look at the sudden unintended acceleration allegations in Teslas, following a petition by a retired Minnesota engineer who independently reviewed the vehicles' design details. The engineer, Ronald Belt, said in his petition that the details had previously been difficult to obtain but had been posted on open-source networks. In his petition, Belt contended that some or all of the sudden unintended acceleration events may have been caused by high-voltage electrical demands on the car's battery. Further, he said, false accelerator signals may be sent to the vehicle's event data recorder, 'causing Tesla and NHTSA to conclude that the driver caused the sudden increase in torque by stepping on the accelerator pedal.' Belt, who has published research papers on auto safety, said he became interested in the phenomenon following the incidents involving Toyota cars. 'I was saddened to see how drivers were ridiculed by saying that they were the cause of the sudden acceleration by stepping on the accelerator pedal, when my engineering background in electronics told me that the vehicle electronics could have caused the sudden acceleration,' Belt said in an email to the Chronicle. Though NHTSA accepted Belt's petition in June 2023, its website still lists an 'open investigation.' A spokesperson said the agency had no updates on the case's status, but that it conducts a 'technical analysis' on all such petitions. If a petition is granted, the government opens a recall investigation. Aside from a form letter he received from the agency acknowledging his petition, Belt said NHTSA has not communicated with him. He's unaware of whether Tesla has responded to his concerns.
