• Local filmmaker Mario Riveira released a short, investigative documentary on ongoing ICE operations taking place in San Francisco, utilizing raw footage, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with immigrants, their families, and local officials. [YouTube]

• An investigation into former high school principal Jonathan M. Fey, 54, at Pleasanton Unified School District in Alameda County found evidence that he attempted to solicit sex from a current and former student using an online app, which resulted in his resignation. [EdSource]
• Halloween Reel Round-Up: Revelers filled the Castro Night Market early Friday evening then later paraded up and down Valencia Street in the Mission; both were preceded by a “Gay Halloween Ice Protest” in front of the immigration court on Montgomery Street Friday afternoon.

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

• The slow-moving Tropical Storm Melissa is expected to become a major hurricane centered over the northern part of the Caribbean Sunday. Experts anticipate multiple days of heavy rain — between 25 and 35 inches in Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, resulting in life-threatening flash flooding and landslides. [Associated Press]
• A large-scale investigation spearheaded by the Mountain View Police Department resulted in the capture of Franklin Enrique Sarceño Orla, 35, who’s suspected of drugging and raping over 60 men in the South Bay dating back to 2018. Sarceño is scheduled to appear in court Monday on 43 felony sexual assault charges after being brought back to Santa Clara from Guatemala where he fled. [KGO]

• A professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University, Daniel Palanker, has created a device that has successfully helped about 30 people with advanced age-related macular degeneration gain their ability to read again during a clinical trial. [SFGate]
• Newsom signed a bill on October 13 that requires the launch of a state commission on the inclusion of trans youth in sports, following backlash over his podcast with Charlie Kirk in March discussing the “unfairness” of allowing trans athlete AB Hernandez to compete in the state track and field competition. [KQED]
• Experts think Prop 50, which would temporarily redraw California’s US Congressional districts before the 2026 midterm election, is sure to win, as Democrats supporting the measure have out-spent opponents, one of whom single-handedly donated $30 million to squash it. [Bay Area News Group]
• Halloween Lovers and Television News Enthusiasts: Now’s your chance to get on the big screen — send pics of your costumes to KRON4 by October 29 to be featured on next Saturday’s broadcast. [KRON4]

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

The two people who tragically died last week when their car became submerged in rapidly rising floodwaters beneath a Caltrain overpass in Millbrae have been identified as a married couple who lived nearby.

The exact circumstances that led to the drowning deaths of of the two victims on a Millbrae street on Thursday, December 23 may remain unknown. But authorities have now ID'd the pair as 63-year-old Rolando Ortigas Glorioso and 62-year-old Susana Glorioso, both of Millbrae. As KTVU reports, neighbors say that they were a married a couple who lived not far from where their car became submerged on East Hillcrest Boulevard.

The street dips below grade under a railway overpass, and intense rain last Thursday morning caused localized flooding that in this location occurred quickly. Rescue crews arrived at the scene and found two people standing atop the roof of a submerged vehicle — and they only later found the gray pickup submerged where the Gloriosos had become trapped in the rising water, after the area was drained, which took several hours.

“At this time we don’t know exactly what happened,” said San Mateo County Sheriff’s Detective Javier Acosta, per KPIX. “However, there was heavy rain this morning.”

Much of low-lying Millbrae became inundated with floodwaters last Thursday following days of heavy rain.

Other localized flooding was reported in various locations around the Bay Area.

Previously: Two Found Dead In Flood-Submerged Vehicle On Low-Lying Street In Millbrae

Two people were found deceased Thursday morning inside a vehicle that became submerged in rapidly rising waters on a Millbrae Street, amid heavy rain.

A low-lying part of Millbrae — a portion of East Hillcrest Boulevard near Hemlock Avenue that dips below a railway bridge — became a hazardous scene early Thursday amid the latest rainstorm. As KPIX reports, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office said firefighters responded to the scene at 5:45 a.m. after receiving reports of severe flooding. Upon arriving, they found a man standing on the roof of a submerged vehicle near the underpass, and then saw that a second vehicle was also submerged.

"The fire department entered the water to rescue the person in the vehicle. While doing that they realized that there was a second vehicle in the water,” said Sheriff’s Detective Javier Acosta, in a statement to KPIX. "So after they rescued the first person, they tried to gain access to the vehicle in the water. However, the conditions changed rapidly and it became too dangerous for the responders. The water was rising very rapidly and they had to retreat."

Once firefighters were able to access the second submerged vehicle, they discovered two individuals deceased inside the car.

It's unclear whether the car had been trying to pass through rising waters at the time — an image of the road from Google Streetview shows that there is no shoulder for parking in the area of the underpass.

Flooding has been reported in multiple locations around San Mateo County following the latest storm, but Millbrae appears to be particularly hard hit.

Images on Twitter from NBC Bay Area and ABC 7's Amy Hollyfield show significant flooding around Millbrae. And Cal Fire said earlier today, "We are responding to multiple flooding calls across the coastal area in San Mateo County."

An attempted murder charge will be escalated to murder in San Mateo County in the case of a woman who was repeatedly struck and run over in a Millbrae parking lot on September 20, after the victim succumbed to her injuries Wednesday morning.

Police quickly arrested the suspect, 23-year-old Garrett Young, whose BMW SUV was seen on surveillance video hitting the woman at a high rate of speed and repeatedly running her over. The incident happened at 12:20 a.m. on September 20 outside the Starbucks at 513 Broadway in Millbrae, and Young's car was soon located, with visible damage, outside a home on Henry Place, about a half mile away.

The video evidence and statements by Young, police said, suggest that the collision was premeditated.

The victim, who has not been publicly identified, was a homeless woman, as the Mercury News reported. Detectives said that Young, who worked at the Safeway across the street from the Starbucks, claimed that the woman had been harassing him while he worked there. Prosecutors say that Young told them the woman had been "mean" to him in recent months.

As KPIX reports, the victim died on Wednesday at SF General from major injuries.

Young is being held without bail at the Maguire Correctional Facility in Redwood City. Attorneys for Young filed a competency motion in the days following his arrest, and a judge assigned two doctors on September 27 to assess Young's mental competency.

Photo: Michael W./Yelp

The lumbering up a set of stairs and across the concourse and down another set of stairs to transfer between BART and Caltrain is no longer necessary, thanks to a new modification.  

One of the reasons that many aspects of Bay Area transit stations seem so counterintuitive and wildly outdated is that they were designed decades ago, by people who are long dead, and had no idea how the modern commuter would be using them today. Case in point — the intermodal Millbrae station that currently serves BART, Caltrain, and Samtrans riders, which was originally just a Caltrain station, and turned into a BART-Caltrain combo in 2003 when BART completed the SFO extension.

Peninsula commuters know well the insane logic problems of transferring between BART and Caltrain, which involves walking up a set of stairs, across the overwalk concourse, then down another set of stairs, where often none of the escalators are going the direction you need so you have to hoof it the whole way, the whole time staring at that stupid fence and saying to yourself “Why don’t they tear that fence down so I can just walk directly?” During this process, you miss your connection and have to wait another 20 minutes.

But that all changed yesterday. The Examiner reports that BART has improved the Caltrain connection at Millbrae, “all but eliminating the concourse trek between the two rail providers that has long plagued regular commuters.” The stupid fence is still there, but the new configuration involves less walking.

“Starting Monday, March 22nd, BART trains will arrive and depart at Millbrae Station from Platform 3, the one closest to Caltrain at the station,” BART said in a release. “This significant improvement will allow riders at Millbrae to cross the same platform to transfer instead of the previous walk up and through the concourse. BART and Caltrain transfer times and wayfinding at the station will also receive improvements.”

And about those missed connections, thanks to completely not-coordinated train timing? The same release says that “BART and Caltrain planners are collaborating with each other detailed scheduling plans to build the best possible connections for the two systems,” though no timeline is given on that.

Related: No One's Using The Millbrae BART Station [SFist]

Image: Pi.1415926535 via Wikimedia Commons

Tiffany Li, the 31-year-old woman at the center of an apparent murder-for-hire case in Millbrae almost one year ago, has with the help of her mother and some wealthy friends posted the $35 million bail that was set for her in the case. As the Associated Press reports, this means she will be released from jail today in San Mateo County, where she's been held since last May, charged with the killing of her children's father, 27-year-old Keith Green.

Li's mother and a "consortium" of wealthy friends put together $4 million in cash and $62 million in property assets as bail — in California, twice the bail amount must be met if property is being used in lieu of cash. This is reportedly the largest bail sum ever recorded in San Mateo County.

San Mateo District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe had argued that bail be set even higher, at $100 million, given that Li and her mother are natives of China, and she is therefore a flight risk. Upon her release, she will be given an ankle monitor, placed on house arrest, and her passport will be taken away. Both Li and her mother are naturalized US citizens.

As CBS 5 reports, Li's attorney said that her bail was posted by "15 to 20 extended family, friends, business associates, people that believe in Tiffany and think that, one, she’ll come to court and two, she’s not guilty."

Green's mother appeared in court wearing a shirt to protest Li's release, as KRON 4's Will Tran posted on Twitter.

Green went missing on April 29, 2016, and his body was discovered on May 11 in Healdsburg. He had apparently gone to meet with Li, with whom he was in a custody dispute over their two small children — and Li had reportedly tried to pay him off to remove himself from her and her children's lives.

Li was at the time living in a mansion in Hillsborough with a mixed-martial-arts-practicing boyfriend, 30-year-old Kaveh Bayat, who was also charged in Green's murder. A third man, an MMA-fighter with a seemingly sketchy past, Olivier Adella, a.k.a. Olivier Bredenstein, was also arrested and charged, though it remains unclear who was the supposed trigger man. Bayat and Adella remain in jail.

Update: Here she is getting released Thursday and chased by multiple press outlets and photographers.

Previously: Three Suspects In Bizarre Millbrae Murder Plead Not Guilty

The trio suspected of killing a young Millbrae father in late April made appearances in San Mateo County court on Wednesday, and all three entered pleas of not guilty, as KRON 4 reports. Details about the circumstances of the death of 27-year-old Keith Green, who went missing on April 29 and whose body later turned up in Healdsburg on May 11, remain scant, including the cause of death and the evidence prosecutors have assembled against the three accused, but some of those are likely to be made public in a preliminary hearing that is now set for October 6.

As we learned in May, 30-year-old Tiffany Li quickly became a prime suspect in the murder because she had been in a romantic relationship with Green, and had two children with him. The pair broke up sometime last year, and according to friends Li immediately took up with Green's good friend, a fellow mixed martial arts fighter, 29-year-old Kaveh Bayat, who also is a suspect in the case. Though none of this has been made official in testimony, Li allegedly has a lot of money and a mansion in nearby Hillsborough, and she had a palimony and custody agreement drawn up last October that Green apparently refused to sign — and that gave him a lump sum of $20,000 as well as payments of $4,000 a month and a Range Rover, but possibly limited access to his children.

The third suspect, who possibly became involved in this as a murder-for-hire though that is unconfirmed so far, is another MMA fighter with an apparently sketchy past, 40-year-old Olivier Adella, a.k.a. Olivier Bredenstein. When the arrests occurred in late May, Adella was the first to be detained, in Burlingame, and Li and Bayat were taken into custody the next morning.

A woman claiming to be Adella's estranged wife later came forward in the press to say that he had threatened to kill her more than once, that he was a con artist, and that he also went by the name Mustafa Traore.

All three suspects are being held without bail, and Li's defense attorney Geoff Carr had delayed their arraignment at least four times in the last several months claiming that the prosecution had not turned over enough of their evidence. Carr, a criminal defense attorney based in Redwood City, also defended a Los Altos woman who pleaded insanity in the 2011 murder of her husband, and earlier this year he defended 26-year-old Ryan Riesenberger who had been implicated in the vehicular death of his best friend in a DUI incident on Highway 1 in 2013.

Previously: Suspect In Murder Of Millbrae Dad Is A Well Known MMA Fighter
Estranged Wife Of MMA Fighter Accused In Millbrae Man's Murder Calls Him 'A Con Artist And A Violent Person'

The case of the murder of Keith Green, a 27-year-old Millbrae father of two, just got a new sinister detail. Though a recently updated Facebook page, now unactivated but cached, showed murder suspect Olivier Adella, a.k.a. Olivier Bredenstein with a new baby and blonde wife in recent months, a woman who claims to still be legally married to him says she's been in hiding from him for "several years," and he isn't who he claims to be. He is, indeed, a mixed martial arts fighter, as we noted last week, but she tells ABC 7 that otherwise, he isn't who he says he is. And, she says, "He's a con artist and he is a very violent person."

The woman, who declined to be identified, said she is cooperating with the investigation into Green's death, and that she's been living in fear of Adella ever since she tried to serve him divorce papers and he was unhappy with his potential financial obligations. The woman says that she has been married to him since 2005, and that he threatened to kill her and her entire family.

Also, she says, he had a third alias he used before he met her: Mustafa Traore.

ABC 7 had been looking to Facebook items like a limo company he claimed to own, which they say just led to a PO Box in San Bruno. He said he was from the Ivory Coast and claimed to have served in the French Foreign Legion and had degrees from universities in France, but his alleged wife says, "None of that is true!"

The woman said she reached out to the station after seeing their reports about his arrest, alongside fellow suspects Tiffany Li and Kaveh Bayat.

What we know so far of the story is that Li and Bayat were both arrested on May 21, ten days after the body of Keith Green was discovered in some woods in Healdsburg. He had been reported missing weeks earlier, and until last year, he had been in a relationship with Li, and had two children with her. According to friends, Li and Green had been in an ongoing battle over the dissolution of their relationship after Li had an affair with Bayat, Green's friend, and Green had refused to sign a separation agreement that apparently gave him a lump sum along with monthly cash payments, as well as a Range Rover. Custody of the children may have been part of the ongoing fight.

Green's roommates said they had not seen him since he went to meet Li at the Pancake House in Burlingame on April 29.

Previously: Suspect In Murder Of Millbrae Dad Is A Well Known MMA Fighter

One of three people who have been charged with the murder of Keith Green, the 27-year-old Millbrae father of two whose body was found May 11 in Healdsburg, turns out to be a well known mixed martial arts fighter as more details in this sordid case begin to trickle out. His name is Olivier Adella, a.k.a. Olivier Bredenstein, and he's a big, buff 40-year-old new father himself who lists himself as both a limo operator and personal trainer. He stands accused, along with 30-year-old Tiffany Li and 29-year-old Kaveh Bayat in Green's killing, though prosecutors have not yet revealed what Adella's role in the crime may have been.

As ABC 7 reports, Adella is originally from the Ivory Coast and once served with the French Foreign Legion.

This appears — though this has not been suggested yet by authorities — to be a possible murder for hire involving a woman from a wealthy background and at least two large men she was romantically involved with, both with neck tattoos. Friends tell ABC 7 that Green, who had two children with Li, found out that she had been having an affair with his friend, Bayat, and they broke up last year. Though they were not married, Li apparently offered Green a lump sum of $20,000 as well as palimony payments of $4,000 a month, as well as a Range Rover, but things turned tense after Green refused to sign a mutual separation agreement to this effect, which was written in October. The custody arrangement appears to have been the sticking point.

Green, a culinary student at Le Cordon Bleu College, was apparently a doting parent who was working two jobs to get his own place.

The Mercury News reports that Bayat had recently been living with Li in a Hillsborough mansion that neighbors had long found mysterious, with "crews of nannies" coming and going and a "fleet of exotic cars in the driveway" including a Rolls Royce, a Ferrari, and a high-performance Mercedes. Both suspects were arrested early Saturday morning after a SWAT team descended on the home. Adella, who lives in Burlingame, was arrested the night before.

The mansion was reportedly bought for Li by her wealthy Chinese mother.

The victim, Keith Green. At right, a photo, possibly from last year, of Green and Li with their two children.

Green was reported missing by roommates on April 29 after he failed to return home following a meeting with Li at the Pancake House in Millbrae the night before. Strangely, he had left his wallet and keys behind. His cell phone was later discovered in the rose garden in Golden Gate Park, and his body then was found two weeks later by homeless outreach workers near a homeless encampment in Healdsburg, with a bullet through his neck.

Li, Bayat, and Adella have all been charged with first-degree murder with a special allegation for being armed with a firearm, according to KRON 4. All three were arraigned on Tuesday.

Greg Burrell (right) from Florida, has his son Ben Burrell snap a picture of him in front of a closure sign at the Millbrae station. This makes day No. 3 of the BART strike.

According to SFist Jonathan, "My train is stopped in Burlingame @ 6:20 pm -- the conductor says the train is being held here due to a bomb threat at Millbrae."

Word is the threat shutdown BART and CalTrain in the area, indefinitely.

We'll update as soon as we know more.

Update 7:41: Jonathan tells us, "[The threat] it's still on. All caltrains stopped 'indefinitely' and no BART service to Millbrae. About 15 cyclists abandoned the train in Burlingame after the conductor announced that the delay might be 3 hours ... [N]ow at the San Bruno BART station [where] BART is running."

Upate 8:30: Suspicious package "deemed harmless." Trains start running and BART station reopens.