SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A man has been arrested in Colorado on suspicion of killing a teenage girl in San Francisco more than four decades ago.

San Francisco police say 76-year-old Mark Personette was arrested this week in connection with the 1978 death of Marissa Harvey.

The 15-year-old girl from New York was visiting the city when her body was found in a park.

Marissa Harvey, shown in this family photo, was visiting San Francisco when she was killed in 1978.(Source: San Francisco PD/KUSA/CNN)

Police said detectives used the best available technology at the time and exhausted every lead, but the probe went cold.

In October 2020, they reopened the case and determined Personette to be a suspect using “advanced investigative methods.”

Detectives say Personette may be a suspect in other unsolved homicides involving young women.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The post Suspect arrested in 15-year-old lady’s killing in San Francisco 43 years later appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Jodi Raffa has been searching for a roommate for over a year. Her husband passed away five years ago, and compounding her loss was a 75% reduction in her household income.

The 76-year-old lives in a sunny three-bedroom, two-bathroom home overlooking a lake in a 55 and over community in Groveland, Fla. The sunsets from her back porch are “stunning.” However, the homeowners association fees just went up again and inflation has left her “flabbergasted.”

“I live on a very strict budget and am not able to indulge in any extras at all,” said Raffa, who worked in administrative jobs before she and her late husband retired in 2010. Raffa now views that move as a “hasty decision” in light of her financial circumstances. “I am a worrier and a planner so logic suggested getting a roommate.”

– ADVERTISEMENT –

When she takes out ads specifying women over 55, she gets responses mostly from men in their 60s or adults in their 20s, 30s, or 40s. Raffa hopes for an easier way to find and vet potential sharers of her home. “I’m very frustrated,” she said.

Like so many boomers, Raffa wants to continue to live in her house and find a job working remotely, either in data entry or editing. Faced with escalating home prices and rents in tight housing markets, as well as careers or earnings curtailed by age or the pandemic, some boomers are looking to share their homes. Enter the boommates.

“With the boomers aging, you see higher and higher numbers in shared housing,” said Rodney Harrell, vice president of family, home and community at AARP, pointing out that boomers are more open than previous generations to trying alternative solutions to the traditional aging trajectory.

In a 1987 interview with NPR, the late Betty White noted that the four women who lived together in “The Golden Girls” did so for social reasons rather than financial necessity. “All that I think we have accomplished is to show that there is an alternative lifestyle,” White told “Fresh Air” about the success of the show. “If you notice, ‘The Golden Girls’ are not together for economic reasons. They’re together for sociological reasons. It fights the loneliness.”

Four decades later, the idea of ​​housemates late into adulthood is experiencing a revival, but with financial factors front and center. As boomers live longer and retire without the financial safety net of employer-sponsored pensions, covering the rising costs of food, housing and insurance become major considerations. Linda Hoffman, founder of the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens, which runs a home sharing program, noted an increasing amount of applications as finances become more of a stressor.

“When we started the home sharing program in 1981, relieving feelings of isolation and loneliness was the primary need,” Hoffman said. “Now, an affordable place to live is the number one need. Hosts need help in meeting their housing expenses.” Even for housemates who entered into the arrangement for social reasons, the extra money has become more important as their financial picture changed with the pandemic.

Debbi Campbell, 70, a retired copywriter, met Loretta Halter, a retired manager from the Kroger grocery chain, in 2018 at a Czech cultural event in New York City. Campbell was grieving the loss of her live-in boyfriend of almost 20 years to cancer. Halter had moved to New York City from Appling, Ga., several years earlier. She had used the NYFSC home sharing program earlier to find affordable apartment but was unhappy in her situation, which is when she decided to become housemates with Campbell.

The two went through the NYFSC program to handle the background checks, vetting and administrative details before Halter moved into Campbell’s rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. Before the pandemic, the two lived somewhat separate lives. Campbell lived mostly in the bedroom and Halter lived mostly in the living room. But when the city shut down they developed a strong friendship.

“First, we started with the crossword and the jigsaw puzzles, and the TV, and it turned out well,” Campbell said. The ease of the later-in-life roommate-as-friend experience surprised her. “I mean, I’m one of those people who’s spent a good time of my life in therapy, mostly complaining about people I knew.”

After initially being furloughed from her job as a long-term temp at the Department of Education in March 2020, Campbell retired in October 2020, at 68, more than a year earlier than she expected. She also opted to take Social Security benefits at that time, instead of waiting until 70 as she had planned.

“I had not been desperate over money, but having a pandemic come, suddenly you have company where you wouldn’t have. And suddenly there is extra money for you from home sharing, which I wouldn’t have had. It was just a bonanza. I feel like the luckiest person of the pandemic,” she said.

While the dozen home sharers interviewed for this story insisted their parents would have found the idea outlandish, having housemates later in life seems to be finding more acceptance. In 2021, 70% of adults over 50 reported being open to sharing their home with a family member who was not a spouse, 51% said they would be willing to share with a friend, and 6% would share a home with a stranger, according to a survey from AARP. Of those who reported they would not share their home at all, 23% said they would change their mind if they needed extra income.

“The majority of people considering home sharing with a friend or family member tells me that there’s an opportunity there for more people to take advantage of that excess housing stock that we already have within our own homes, and that perhaps meet your needs, and those of a friend or neighbor,” Harrell said. “Or maybe companionship that may help with costs, such as caregiving. There’s just so much advantage there. And we’re just not necessarily taking advantage of it. It’s nowhere near its potential.”

The growing interest in home sharing, especially for those boomers who are house-rich and cash-poor in expensive housing markets, is being cultivated by nonprofit and commercial programs as well as municipalities. Since 2015, New York, Seattle, Denver, Tucson, northern California and the metro Washington area all have or are launching programs.

“From what we’ve seen, attitudes are loosening toward home sharing,” Riley Gibson, president of Denver-based home sharing service Silvernest, which pairs older adults with housemates. The service is particularly active in tighter housing markets such as San Francisco, Phoenix, Tampa, Miami and Los Angeles. Silvernest recently partnered with Montgomery County in Maryland to start a pilot program and plans to launch in a few more cities later this year.

Renters and homeowners can fill out profiles on the site, which supports services including lease templates, insurance and background checks. A similar service, Boston-based Nesterly, matches older adults with younger ones to promote intergenerational home shares. Senior Homeshares, another service, has enrolled nearly 70,000 members across the country since its inception in 2015.

Even before the pandemic, demographics were shifting toward nonfamily households. In 1960, 85% of households were composed of families, according to the Population Reference Bureau. By 2017, that figure had fallen to 65% of households.

As Americans continue to age, Harrell and others expect growing demand for more housing options. “As a society, we’ve been building and thinking about younger families and building housing and communities for younger people,” he said.

“But that need has been shifting as community leaders, builders and designers” are “starting to think more and more about what happens to us as we age. And covid has given momentum to those conversations,” Harrell said.

For Kim Bolding, 61, home sharing enabled her to stay in the five-bedroom Colorado Springs home where she had raised her biological, adopted and foster children after being diagnosed with a form of muscular dystrophy in 2012.

Bolding, a former social worker, was able to keep working from home until 2017. But after she was forced to go on Social Security disability, the payments weren’t enough to keep up with her housing costs. “I did not want to have to go into just affiliate-type living. I wanted to keep my home,” she said.

First, a longtime neighbor moved downstairs, where he could have his own bathroom. With the help of Denver-based nonprofit Sunshine Home Share Colorado, Bolding found two more housemates. Since then, she has mostly lived with three other housemates at a time: two men on one floor sharing a bathroom and a woman on her floor. “It’s allowing me to be able to maintain my own individuality. I can say what I want when I set my own needs and rules,” she said.

All of the housemates are on disability, but collectively able to live independently. Bolding is able to host her adult children when they visit, but they don’t feel obligated to move in with her to manage her illness. Instead, she is building a new community with her housemates, holding regular dinners together.

“We run it like a family and we have space for others,” Bolding said. Having housemates is “a great alternative to being stuck in some place where you don’t have a lot of choices: who your neighbors are, who you interact with, or you lose a lot of autonomy and that’s part of the problem with aging, ” she added.

Bolding has already had several housemates who have moved out because of a change in their fortunes. Two have received government-subsidized housing, one has gotten married and another inherited a house and cars from an uncle who recently passed away. She thinks of her house as a harbinger of good luck and said she has received many calls asking for information or guidance on doing something similar.

“It’s becoming more and more popular, especially for my age group for people in similar situations. We need each other. We get blessed and they get blessed,” Bolding said.

The post The brand new Golden Women: Child boomers are shifting in collectively to save cash appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

OAKLAND (BCN) – According to a new report released on Wednesday by the Oakland-based nonprofit Alliance for Girls, girls and gender-specific teens collectively faced larger mental health barriers, more caring responsibilities and fewer resources during the pandemic.

Using mixed methods analysis to interview more than 1,200 girls across the state, the report found that isolation in the early stages of lockdown caused 66 percent of participants to be more stressed or anxious in various ways.

CONTINUE READING: COVID: Santa Clara County Prepares For Boosters, Uses ‘Vax Mobile’ To Reach Unvaccinated

About 44 percent of girls said they had more caregiving duties at home than they did before the pandemic, and 31 percent said those duties had a negative impact on their education, the report said.

About 30 percent of girls said they couldn’t get the educational support they needed, 12 percent said they didn’t have a safe place to live, and 15 percent said they didn’t have access to a caring adult during lockdown, according to in called the report.

The findings applied to the report’s analysts, many of whom are girls themselves. Alliance for Girls brought in 16-20 year old members from its Young Women Leadership Board, made up of young women willing to share their experiences in order to keep advocacy relevant.

For example, researcher and board member Uche Esomonu said she could refer to participants’ reports of increased household responsibilities.

“Many of us really understood the concerns expressed in the survey responses. I believe that we are best placed not only to evaluate the data we see, but also to collect recommendations and develop support programs that could help alleviate some of the challenges expressed in the survey responses were brought, ”said Esomonu.

Emma Mayerson, founding director of Alliance for Girls, said the pandemic was not bringing new inequalities, but worsening longstanding challenges for girls to thrive in an already fragile ecosystem.

“For too long we have silenced the voices of women, girls and gender-specific youth, and for too long we have relied on them to be on the front lines of crises, caring for our young, old and sick, and working twice as hard for less, all without making sure they get the support they need to not only survive but thrive, ”Mayerson said.

CONTINUE READING: UPDATE: Cache Fire Destroys Dozen of Lake County Homes; Clearlake, Lower Lake evacuated

This was particularly the case with girls in vulnerable populations, such as the pregnant and parental teenagers whom Sandra Flores, interim executive director of Teen Success, Inc., helps on a daily basis. Too often, these parents are overlooked by the school districts under normal conditions, and it’s important to reach out to them in order to do better in the future, she said.

“We cannot emphasize enough the isolation our members have experienced. There was a tremendous social and emotional impact on what was already happening, ”said Flores. “And if you were a young mother who was already struggling with childbirth, things got worse.”

Kendra Edwards, data and analytics manager at MISSEY Inc., an organization committed to protecting and caring for sexually exploited adolescents, said the needs of black and transgender girls must be specifically addressed in order to have an overall safe community a political level. From her work, she has seen that sexual exploitation is consistent with those who systemically lack adequate services or support.

“Girls tell us that health and wellbeing for them requires access to safe spaces and supportive adults, and that health is relational, that safety is related to belonging,” said Edwards. “And these definitions, these demands have to be made at a political level because we often don’t even think about mental health or safety. Our girls tell us that it has to be. ”

The report urges schools, policymakers and funders to put girls’ wellbeing at the center of planning for services and support.

Aimee Eng, school principal for the Oakland Unified School District, attended the report’s press conference Tuesday to discuss the report, and said the district’s partnership helped them respond and adapt to the needs of girls. For example, in an initial survey in Spring 2020, Alliance for Girls showed that girls in the district rely heavily on schools for menstrual products, and the district has stocked its food distribution locations across town with period products.

“Thanks to this report, we now have even more information that can help us take action to ensure we meet the needs of girls, especially girls of color and gender-specific youth, during this time,” said Eng.

MORE NEWS: Mets offense finally breaks through in a 6-2 win over Giants

© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Bay City News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

The post New Report by Nonprofit Analyzes Wrestle of Women Throughout Pandemic – CBS San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

The 43-year-old worked as a craftsman who was often hired to do odd jobs for his neighbors.

According to police, during one of these jobs, he lured two young girls, ages 7 and 8, to a remote area and touched them. They say it happened separately over the course of several days.

Moffett Mobilehome Park residents were surprised to hear that their neighbor has been arrested.

“I can’t believe it,” said neighbor Belinda Preseren. “I mean, he asked my son, ‘Do you believe in God?’ You know. He looked like he had the Lord’s love in his heart. “

According to the police, the two young girls are sisters who told their parents what happened. They do not live in the RV park, but visit their grandmother there regularly.

The arrest also came as a surprise to members of the Spanish Seventh-day Adventist Church in Mountain View. It is said that Palacios has been attending church services regularly for years.

“Anyone who ends every sentence with ‘God bless you’ is always a warning sign,” said Joe Lilley, manager of the Moffett mobile home park.

But others say they always had a strange feeling about Palacios. They are now grateful that their little ones didn’t get close to him.

“There were a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old girl and that bothers me because I have a 10-year-old granddaughter,” said neighbor Cassandra Lilley. “I wouldn’t like that at all and to know that he’s over there really bothers me.”

The police are asking the population to help identify other children who may have been victims of the suspect. Anyone with information can call Detective Jessica Nanez at (650) 903-6395 or leave an anonymous tip at (650) 961-5800.

Copyright © 2021 KGO-TV. All rights reserved.

The post Mountain View handyman accused of molesting two younger women at Moffett Mobilehome Park appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Given the end of athletics in the county, the Daily Journal decided to dive into our 20 year old archives to bring readers some of our favorite stories over the years.

JAN. 18, 2018 – Given that the South City girls’ soccer team dominated the rain-soaked game against Hillsdale, it was only fitting that the Warriors took an important win on Thursday night.

But the fact that South City took a bit of luck – good or bad, whichever side you chose – to get the 4-3 win shows how insane the game can be.

And it wasn’t what you’re probably thinking. Despite a steady drizzle throughout the game, varying in intensity, it wasn’t a crazy water-guided jump or an unexpected jump off the grass because of the wet artificial turf at Clifford Field on the South City campus.

South City’s ultimate goal was the result of hard work. Alex Jara, a second midfielder, ran onto a through pass in the direction of the right corner flag. She carried the ball to the end line before sending a cross in front of Hillsdale gate. A South City striker and Knights defender fell shoulder to shoulder on goal. Hillsdale defender attempted a risky clearance only to get in the back of her own net 11 minutes before the game was over.

It was the perfect example of hard work that made its own happiness. The warriors dominated possession and had by far the most dangerous chances. South City had a 14-6 lead on shots, nine of which were in the picture.

“My player was there (in front of goal),” said South City coach Salvador Navarro. “If she (the Hillsdale attorney) doesn’t use it, my girl was there.”

Jara had a big game for the Warriors, scoring two goals, assisting in a third and creating the own goal.

This closing balance was an exciting game in which the teams scored six goals in the first half. It was a pivotal win for the Warriors, who finished second in the Ocean Division of the Peninsula Athletic League on their own. Both South City (5-2 PAL Ocean) and Hillsdale (4-3) came in second, trying to keep up with Sequoia in first place (5-1 went into Half Moon Bay with 0-6 on Thursday Game). .

“I am fine [the loss]”Said Hillsdale trainer Rachel Lauderdale.” Given how wet it is, I’m fine [the result]. If they played like that when it was dry, that would be different. “

Although Hillsdale had to watch and defend most of the game, he took advantage of his opportunities. The Knights managed six shots on goal, half of which found the back of the net.

“Every time they had a chance they scored,” Navarro said of the Knights.

Hillsdale’s first chance came in the fourth minute and the Knights converted. The freshman wing Aaliyah Schinaman received a pass on the right flank and ran down the sideline for a long time. Before reaching the end line, she sent a flank to the front of the gate, where the South City goalkeeper got her hands on it.

But as it did with the slippery ball for both goalkeepers for most of the day, South City couldn’t correct it, and a ricochet trickled out in front of her – where freshman striker Kathleen Siu quickly put it in the net and Hillsdale with 1 : 0 brought the lead.

It was a short-lived benefit, however, when South City missed the subsequent kick-off and scored about a minute later. Jara received a pass in the top of the box, turned and equalized.

South City would keep the pressure up, with Jara dominating upstairs, receiving passes, turning and running past defenders, either shooting dangerous shots or making dangerous crosses.

And despite the Warriors’ strong possession game, they didn’t seem as affected by the wet field as Hillsdale. “We practice a lot of one-and-two-touch in training,” said Navarro. Hillsdale regained the lead in the 17th minute and scored his second goal with as many shots.

Second defensive midfielder Ekaterini Economou rose in the defensive half, came on a steal and pushed forward. In midfield, she sent a long diagonal pass to the right wing, which Shinaman chased for a long time. She gained possession of the ball, threw herself into goal and shot a perfectly placed shot into the left corner of the net to give Hillsdale a 2-1 advantage.

The warriors came back and tied it 2-0 in the 28th minute. Jara intercepted a Hillsdale pass deep in his own end. She then went around two defenders, carried to the finish line, and sent a cross back to the front of the gate, where Fernanda Ramirez waited and once fired a diverted shot into the net.

Twelve minutes before the end of the first half there was enough time for two more goals. Hillsdale took a 3-2 lead less than five minutes later. Shinaman, who fell back on the left full-back to slow Jara, won a ball on her defense and immediately sent second striker Alyssa Nicole Cano to a 1-1 breakaway. She calmly and skillfully beat the attacking goalkeeper on the far right.

Another five minutes later, the game was tied for the third time in the half. The Warriors received a free kick near midfield. Ariana Garcia found Jara with her back to the goal up in the Hillsdale penalty area. She turned and reconsidered her shot from 20 yards to end half-time in a 3-0 draw.

In the second half, Hillsdale made a formation adjustment to help the Knights better cope with the dominance in the South City midfield. It helped slow down the Warriors, who managed just four shots after firing 10 in the first 40 minutes.

“We switched from a 4-4-2 to a 4-5-1 (by throwing an extra player in midfield) to improve a little more (defensively),” said Lauderdale.

The starting goal came with 11 minutes of play time and the Knights exerted the most consistent offensive pressure in the game to find the balance. Shinaman looked good a few times in the last few minutes – but her first shot was saved and her second chance rolled off her foot as space opened in the South City penalty area.

“It was intense,” said Jara. “[The game] went back and forth, but we kept pushing for victory. “

The post From the sports activities archives: South San Francisco women’ soccer staff earn key win over Hillsdale | Native appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.