High school basketball in Southern California will be without one of its finest coaches this season.
Stephen Singleton, who guided Eastvale Roosevelt to state and Southern Section Open Division championships last season, announced his retirement from coaching on Thursday after 10 years at Roosevelt and 25 years in the business. He will continue as a teacher.
Singleton intends to spend more time coaching his young son.
He also won a state Division I title in 2017 with Roosevelt and won a state Division II title coaching briefly at Dominguez in Compton in 2001.
With official basketball practice starting soon, Roosevelt intends to open the position to all candidates, but there’s two assistants who are teachers at the school that could possibly ease the transition if they are interested in the head coaching position.
It was perfect timing on Monday for the Moore League to hold its first football media day, considering that five of the seven head coaches are new and the host school, Long Beach Jordan, is opening its new stadium next week.
Alfred Rowe (Long Beach Jordan), Mario Morales (Lakewood), Justin Utupo (Long Beach Poly), Raudric Curtis (Long Beach Wilson) and Malcolm Manuel (Long Beach Cabrillo) all promised to lead their respective programs to success through passion and determination. The two returning coaches, Romeo Pellum (Long Beach Millikan) and Calvin Bryant (Compton), offered similar commitments.
“Just having a new stadium and changing the culture, it’s exciting,” said Rowe, who went to Long Beach Poly and played for Pete Carroll at USC. “The most important thing is effort. Our goal is nobody is going to outplay us.”
Compton has a new stadium and a new $225-million, 31-acre campus. Bryant spent five years having his students attend a former middle school. “Our guys are fired up,” Bryant said. “I can’t get them to go home.”
They love their weight room. They love their classrooms. The team went 3-7 last season but could be one of the most improved. They just added All-City running back Edward Rivera from South East.
Five of the seven head coaches are Black, reinforcing the diversity of the schools they represent. “The coaches and leaders look like their players,” Lakewood’s Morales said.
Curtis played at Pomona-Pitzer and is a former head coach at Bellflower and was an assistant at Mayfair. “Wilson is not going to be edged out any longer,” he vowed. “We’re not going to take a back seat any longer.”
There were big-time players in attendance, including 6-foot-4, 220-pound tight end Jude Nelson of Long Beach Millikan. He’s bigger now than his brother, quarterback Malachi Nelson. “I can beat him up a little,” he joked.
Poly brought quarterback Deuce Jefferson (Weber State), cornerback Donte Wright Jr. (Georgia), tight end Jaden Hernandez (Colorado State), among others. Lineman Anthony Rodriguez certainly looked like he has spent the offseason in the weight room. He’s 6-5, 280 pounds, down 20 pounds from last season. Committed to UC Davis, he said, “I’m way leaner. I’m still chunky but thick.”
Wilson has 6-5 quarterback Mack Cooper, a three-year starter. Lakewood turns to three-year starter Tiwan Jones in the secondary.
All-league basketball player Sama’Jay Jackson of LB Jordan is playing football for first time since 2020. QB. 6-4. He quit during COVID. Junior. pic.twitter.com/YEhLV9bsIe
One of the most intriguing players is 6-4 junior quarterback Sama’Jay Jackson of Jordan. He was an all-league basketball player. He’s returning to football for the first time since he gave up the sport in 2020 when the pandemic struck. He’s fast, running a 4.6-second 40-yard dash.
Millikan is opening its season next weekend in Nevada playing Foothill in Henderson.
After her brother, Richard Ware, 48, was stabbed to death outside a Los Feliz homeless shelter last month, it fell to her to hold their extended family together.
Just eight months prior, another relative — her 36-year-old nephew, Jesse Darjean — was gunned down around the block from his childhood home in Compton. His slaying remains unsolved.
Across L.A. County and around the country, murder rates are falling to lows not seen since the late 1960s. Yet clearance rates — a measure of how often police solve cases — have remained relatively steady. In other words: Even with fewer homicides to investigate, authorities have been unable to bring more murderers to justice. Police data show killings of Black and Latino people are still less likely to be solved than those of white or Asian victims.
Carter’s hometown of Compton is still crawling out from under its reputation as a national epicenter for gang violence. But for all of its continued struggles, violent crime — especially killings — has plummeted. When the gang wars peaked in 1991, there were 87 homicides. Last year, there were 18, including Darjean’s fatal shooting on Oct. 24.
The way Carter sees it, the killers who took her brother and nephew are both getting away with it — but for different reasons. In Darjean’s shooting, there are no known suspects, witnesses or motive. But the man who stabbed Ware is known to authorities. The L.A. County district attorney’s office declined to file charges against him, finding evidence of self-defense, according to a memo released to The Times.
Ware’s sister and other relatives dispute the D.A.’s decision, claiming authorities have failed to fully investigate.
“The system failed him,” Carter said.
In the absence of arrests and charges, Carter and her family have simmered with rage, grief and frustration. With digital footprints, DNA testing and more resources than ever available to police, how is it that the people who took their loved ones are still walking free?
Jessica Carter, right, lights candles on the sidewalk to memorialize her brother, Richard Ware, who was stabbed to death outside a nearby homeless shelter.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
In Darjean’s case, the investigation is led by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which has patrolled Compton since 2000, when the city disbanded its own Police Department. Leads appear to be scarce. His body was found in the back seat of his car, which had been riddled with bullets. A father of three, he had just gotten home late at night from one of his jobs as a security guard.
To Sherrina Lewis, his mother, it seemed the world was quick to forget and move on. News outlets largely ignored the shooting. Social media sensationalized it. She couldn’t resist reading some of the comments online, speculating about whether her son was killed by someone he knew or because of his race or a gang affiliation.
But, Darjean was no gangster, she says. True, there had been rumors around the neighborhood about escalating conflict between the Cedar Block Pirus, a Black gang, and their Latino rivals. But if anything, Lewis said, her son was targeted in a classic case of wrong place, wrong time.
Jesse Darjean in an undated photo.
(Jessica Carter)
When homicide detectives began knocking on doors for answers, her former neighbors claimed not to have seen anything. For Lewis, it felt like betrayal — many of those neighbors had watched Darjean grow up with their kids.
“Each and every day I have to ask God to lift the hardness in my heart, because I‘m angry,” Lewis said. “They’re not gonna make my son no cold case, I promise you that.”
Lewis nearly lost Darjean once before, at the moment of his birth.
He and his twin brother were born three months early, and doctors warned that Darjean was the less likely of the two to survive. He suffered from respiratory problems, which left him dependent on a breathing machine. The prognosis was bleak.
Casha, left, and her brother Jesse Darjean as babies.
(Jessica Carter)
Doctors asked her for “a name for his death certificate” in case he died en route to a hospital in Long Beach. Picking “Jesse” on the spot was agony, she said. In the end, Darjean was the twin who survived.
Shy as a child, he had grown up to be outgoing and witty, a person who loved to cook soul food and make dance videos with his sister and post them on Instagram. While his siblings all moved away as they got older, Darjean insisted on staying put. Compton was home, through and through, he used to tell his mother. He wasn’t blind to the gang violence, but he came to know a different side of the city, one that represented Black joy and resilience — a side he saw captured in Kendrick Lamar’s music video for the Grammy-winning “Not Like Us.”
When his niece ran for Miss Teen Compton, Darjean advocated on her behalf by taking out a full-page ad in the local newspaper that proclaimed: “Compton is the best city on Earth.”
But Darjean knew the pain of losing loved ones. His friend Montae Talbert was killed late one night in 2011 in a drive-by shooting outside an Inglewood liquor store. Talbert, known as M-Bone, was a member of the rap group Cali Swag District, the group behind the viral rap dance the “Dougie.”
Around the same time, the mother of Darjean’s oldest daughter was gunned down in Compton. A few years later, another uncle, Terry Carter, a businessman who built classic lowrider cars and started a record label with Ice Cube, was struck and killed by a vehicle driven by rap impresario Marion “Suge” Knight.
After Darjean’s funeral, which Lewis said drew more than 1,000 people, she returned to the scene of the shooting: Brazil Street, right off Wilmington Avenue, on a modest block of stucco and wood-frame homes.
With the bravado of an angry, grieving mother, she began going door-to-door in her old neighborhood, seeking answers. She wanted to show anyone who was watching that she wouldn’t be intimidated into silence.
When she confronted one of Darjean’s close childhood friends about what happened, he swore he didn’t know anything. She didn’t believe him.
“He just broke down crying. I can tell it was eating him up,” Lewis said.
The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to multiple inquires about Darjean’s case.
Jesse Darjean holds his daughter Jessica. At right is another relative.
(Jessica Carter)
On some level, Lewis understands the hesitancy. Fear of gang retaliation and distrust of law enforcement still hangs over the west Compton neighborhood. After raising her six children there, in 2006 she sold their family home of 50 years and moved to Palmdale because she didn’t want her “kids to become accustomed to death.” For her, she said, the final straw was the discovery of a body “propped up” on her neighbor’s fence.
Like generations of Black women before her, Lewis is faced with enormous pressure to carry their family’s burden. Possessing a superhuman-like will to overcome adversity is celebrated by society with terms such as “Black Girl Magic” and “Strong Black Woman,” said Keisha Bentley-Edwards, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University. But such unrealistic expectations not only strip Black women of their innocence from an early age, but also contribute to higher pregnancy-related death rates and other bad health outcomes, she said.
“A lot of times people expect Black women to take care of it,” Bentley-Edwards said in an interview. Instead of romanticizing the struggle, she said, there should be “tangible support like housing or employment” and other resources.
But experts say safety nets are at risk, particularly after the Trump administration in April terminated roughly $811 million in public safety grants for L.A. and other major cities. As a result, federal funds for victim services programs, which offer counseling and other resources, have been slashed.
Lewis never thought she’d be in a position to need such help.
“The funny thing is, we’re from Compton born and raised, but we were not a statistic until my son was murdered,” she said. “My kids had a two-parent household. We both had jobs. We weren’t doing welfare: I worked every day.”
Months of waiting on an arrest in Darjean’s death led Carter, his aunt, into a “dark place.” She ended up taking a spiritual retreat into the mountains of Nigeria.
She was still working through the feelings of anger and guilt when she learned her brother, Ware, had been fatally stabbed on July 5.
She described the days and weeks that followed as a teary blur. Coming from a family of nurses taught her how to push aside her own grief and forge on, but she was left wondering how much more she could endure.
Ware, who went by Duke, was his family’s unofficial historian, setting out to map out their sprawling Portuguese and Creole roots and scouring the internet for long-lost relatives. He used to brag all the time about his daughter, who had graduated from nursing school and moved back to the L.A. area to work at a pediatric intensive care unit on the Westside. He used to joke that for all of his shortcomings as a father, he had at least gotten one thing right.
In recent months, though, Ware’s life had started to spiral. His diabetes had gotten worse, and a back injury left him unable to continue in his job as a long-haul truck driver. Relatives worried he was hiding a drug addiction from them.
He had adopted a bull mastiff puppy named Nala. She used to follow him everywhere, usually trotting a few steps behind without a leash. Even when he was having trouble making ends meet, he always “spoiled her,” his family said.
For a few months, he lived out of a van one of his sisters bought for him. He then landed at a shelter, a hangar-style structure on the edge of Griffith Park. He and Nala were kicked out after a short time, but he still frequented the area, and it’s where L.A. County authorities said the fight that ended in his killing began.
Prosecutors said in a memo that surveillance video showed Ware and his dog chasing another man into a parking lot across the street from the shelter. The two men, the D.A.’s memo said, had been involved in an ongoing dispute, possibly over a woman.
Friends, family and supporters of Richard Ware gather near the shelter where he was stabbed to death.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
According to the memo, the man said he’d been carrying a knife because of a previous altercation in which Ware ordered his dog to attack. On the day of the stabbing, the man said, Ware had shown up with Nala at the shelter, looking for a confrontation.
After the fight, responding officers found Ware suffering from a deep wound to his chest, Nala with several lacerations and the suspect hiding in a nearby porta-potty. His clothes had been torn off, and he was bleeding profusely from several severe dog bites, the memo said. Prosecutors said witnesses corroborated the man’s story that Ware had been the aggressor, in addition to the video footage.
Ware’s family says that account contradicts what they heard from other residents, who claimed Ware was the one defending himself after the other man attacked him with a vodka bottle. In the meantime, they are working to secure Nala’s release from the pound, where she has been nursing her injuries.
Richard Ware, 48, was stabbed to death on July 5 outside a Los Feliz homeless shelter.
(Jessica Carter)
On July 8, Carter organized a candlelight vigil for her brother outside the shelter where the killing happened. That morning, she said, she cried in the shower before steeling herself so she could run out to a Dollar Tree store to pick up some balloons.
When she got to the vigil, Lewis made her way around, greeting the swarm of relatives holding homemade signs and chanting Ware’s name. After a final prayer, the group released balloons, most of which floated upward with the evening’s lazy breeze. Some, though, got caught in the branches of a large tree nearby.
A smile finally crossed Carter’s face as she pointed up to them. She took it as a sign from Ware, as though he was saying a last goodbye before he departed to heaven.
Stuart Compton was sentenced to life in prison for planning “brutal” sex offences against children alongside his girlfriend, Tracy Turner who was sentenced 12 years
A man has been sentenced to life imprisonment for planning “brutal” sex offences against children, alongside his hospital worker girlfriend.
Stuart Compton, 46, has been sentenced to life in prison, while Tracy Turner, 52, will face 12 years in prison plus another two on licence.
Turner, from Roath, Cardiff, who was an operating theatre assistant at University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, previously admitted six charges of arranging the commission of child sex offences, and two charges of making indecent images of a child.
Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court heard the couple, who dubbed themselves “Bonnie and Clyde”, sent about 100,000 messages discussing the rape and abuse of three different children.
Compton, of Cathays, Cardiff, also previously admitted six charges of arranging the commission of child sex offences.
He will serve a minimum tariff of seven years before he can apply for parole.
Turner will be eligible for parole after serving two thirds of her sentence.
Warning: this story contains graphic details
Sentencing Compton to life in prison, Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke told him “it is clear you were the driving force in the messages” and he “did not accept seriousness” of his offending.
Addressing Compton, she said: “Unless and until the parole board considers it safe to release you, you will remain in prison.”
The court heard it took officers several weeks to go through the messages, which related to two girls and a boy under the age of 13 at the time the messages began.
Two of the children were aged eight and one was 12 when Compton and Turner began discussing them.
Wales News Service
Stuart Compton pleaded guilty to six charges of arranging the commission of child sex offences
Prosecutor Matthew Cobbe told the court there were an “extraordinary amount” of messages related to “discussing sexual depravity involving children”.
Mr Cobbe said while no contact was made with the children, the messages sent over many months showed a “clear attempt to arrange and commit sexual activities” with the children.
“Fantasy plainly turned into obsession,” Mr Cobbe said, as Compton described in messages “graphic accounts of what he wanted to do” with individual children.
The court heard that messages showed Compton was interested in children “aged one to six”.
Both Compton and Turner shook their heads as graphic details of the messages they sent to each other were read out.
Mr Cobbe said the pair exchanged messages where they discuss the possibility of going to a festival or camping, so they could “be around” families with young children.
“Turner suggests a family festival, not too expensive,” Mr Cobbe said.
In the messages, Compton described it as a great idea, commenting he would like to go to a “hippy one, where lots of drugs consumed leaving unattended girls”.
“That’s genius babe,” Compton added.
Judge Lloyd-Clarke said the messages were “not pure fantasy” and they both clearly intended to carry out brutal abuse, as they had “carefully identified” a location for one of the rapes to take place.
She added their actions had “devastated the families” of the children.
Wales News Service
Tracy Turner, an operating theatre assistant at Cardiff’s University Hospital of Wales admitted six charges of arranging the commission of child sex offences
The court heard of “brutal acts” planned for the children in specific locations including a shed and a graveyard.
Mr Cobbe told the court they discussed the “disposal” of a child if their attack had lead to a “fatal conclusion” with Compton saying he would take full responsibility if that happened.
The prosecutor told the court “what began as fantasy became obsession and an intended goal”.
One plan included drugging one of the children with a sleeping pill before abusing them.
Mr Cobbe said it was clear Compton “wanted the plan to go ahead”.
Compton would press Turner whether she wanted to be present, the court heard, and she confirmed she did, and that she wanted to be involved.
None of the offences were related to Turner’s hospital role although she was suspended from work after she was arrested.
Compton also admitted making and distributing images of child abuse by sending images to “like-minded people”.
Compton was arrested in December 2024 after a concern was raised about messages from him on a dating app.
He told police he did not have his phone with him, but Turner had given it to a pub landlord for safe keeping before asking the police what was happening.
The landlord passed the phone to police and Turner was also arrested.
The parents of the children had personal impact statements read in court.
One mother said that when she heard what the messages contained, it was “gut-wrenching and sickening. I lost my appetite and was upset and sick all the time”.
The mother said “we stopped walking to school altogether and didn’t know who we could trust”, adding “we are hesitant to allow them to socialise away from us”.
She said the thought “of what could have happened to our child by two people with monstrous sexual intent is unfathomable”.
The father of another child said: “The pain they have put me and my family through is incomprehensible. It’s harder than losing my mother.”
The mother of a third child said she was “furious”, adding she was “put in a situation where I have to lie to my child to protect her from the truth”.
“In time I hope my internal horror will diminish,” she added.
David Butt, Det Insp at South Wales Police, described the “volume and nature” of the content as the “worst of the worst”.
“Turner and Compton believe they can hide behind phone screens, but this is clearly not the case,” he added.
He said he hoped the sentencing would bring the victims families “a little comfort”, adding it was the forces “absolute priority” to protect children.
The Cardiff and Vale University Health Board said it would be “inappropriate” for them to comment on the case but confirmed Turner was dismissed from her position in March 2025.
In a statement, a spokesperson said the safety and wellbeing of patients is its “highest priority” and assured patients that the case is “entirely unconnected” with Turner’s employment at the health board.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, there is support available through BBC Action Line.
California’s two most prominent Democrats remain mum on their future plans, but former Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Gavin Newsom both took time to tend to their political personas in Compton Thursday, attending separate events at local schools.
As hundreds of graduating seniors crossed the stage in their blue and white regalia early that morning at Compton High School, many paused to shake hands and take selfies with an honored guest on the dais: the former vice president herself, who’d made a surprise appearance after being invited by a graduating student.
Several hours later, Newsom read to young students at Compton’s Clinton Elementary School before standing with local leaders in front of a cheery, cartoon mural to launch a new state literacy plan. The issue is one of deep importance to the governor, whose own educational career was often defined by his dyslexia.
The adjacent appearances, which occurred a few miles apart, were “coincidental,” Newsom said. But they come at a moment when both the high-octane Democrats are in a political limbo of sorts.
The pair are viewed as potential 2028 presidential candidates, but the California political world is also waiting on tenterhooks to see if Harris enters California’s 2026 race for governor – a move that would almost certainly preclude a 2028 presidential bid. Harris is expected to make a decision by summer, and her entrance would upend the already crowded race.
With just 19 months left in his second and final term, the lame duck governor is scrambling to cement his gubernatorial legacy while also positioning himself as a pragmatic leader capable of steering his national party out of the wilderness. Harris, meanwhile, must decide if she actually wants to govern a famously unwieldy state and, if she does, whether California voters feel the same.
Both Harris and Newsom were notably absent at the state party convention last weekend, as thousands of party delegates, activists, donors and labor leaders convened in Anaheim.
California Governor Gavin Newsom presents his Golden State Literacy Plan at Clinton Elementary School in Compton on Thursday.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Newsom was a famously loyal surrogate to then-President Biden. But in recent months with his “This Is Gavin Newsom” podcast and its long list of Democratic bête noire guests, the governor has worked to publicly differentiate his own brand from that of his bedraggled party, one controversial interview at a time.
Meanwhile, Newsom — who previously scoffed at the speculation and said he wasn’t considering a bid for the White House, despite his manifest ambitions — is more openly acknowledging that he could run for the country’s top job in the future.
“I might,” Newsom said in an interview last month. “I don’t know, but I have to have a burning why, and I have to have a compelling vision that distinguishes myself from anybody else. Without that, without both, and, I don’t deserve to even be in the conversation.”
Newsom demurred Thursday when asked whether he thought Harris would run for governor.
“Look, I got someone right behind me running for governor, so I’m going to be very careful here,” Newsom said to laughter, as California Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond — who announced his 2026 gubernatorial bid back in September 2023 — smiled behind him.
Harris attended the Compton High graduation at the invitation of Compton Unified School District Student Board Member MyShay Causey, a student athlete and graduating senior. She did not speak at the ceremony, though she received an honorary diploma.
Staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.
