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El Segundo father arrested after installing unauthorized stop signs near children’s park

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A longtime El Segundo resident was arrested earlier this month after installing unauthorized stop signs at a neighborhood intersection he says has become increasingly dangerous for children.

Joseph Brandlin, 44, who has lived in El Segundo more than four decades, said he took matters into his own hands after months of unsuccessful attempts to get city officials to address safety concerns about the intersection of Loma Vista Street and Acacia Avenue.

The intersection is currently a two-way stop and is located near Acacia Park, a children’s park that reopened after renovation in 2021.

“I care deeply about the safety of our neighborhood and the families that live here,” Brandlin said.

Brandlin raised concerns about the intersection last year. He and other residents submitted a petition with roughly 50 signatures requesting additional stop signs. The city later said it conducted a traffic evaluation, but residents were not notified when it took place and saw no visible evidence of it, according to Brandlin.

El Segundo resident Joseph Brandlin was arrested earlier this month after installing unauthorized stop signs.

The city ultimately determined the intersection did not meet the required traffic volume for additional stop signs, Brandlin said.

But residents say that the city’s standard doesn’t reflect reality.

“There’s a park right there, and it’s a magnet for children,” said Gary Sanders, 62, a resident in the neighborhood for more than 30 years. He noted that drivers traveling downhill toward the intersection often gain speed and may not anticipate pedestrians crossing.

On weekends and after school, the area becomes especially busy with families and parked cars, according to Sanders.

“A tragedy could occur,” he said. “I wonder if a tragedy does have to occur for the city to do something about it.”

A resident walks his dog towards the intersection of Loma Vista Street and west Acacia Avenue in El Segundo.

In the weeks leading up to his arrest, Brandlin said he witnessed several near-collisions, including incidents involving children.

He described a close call involving his son, who was nearly hit while on a bike due to limited visibility at the intersection.

“That was the last straw,” he said.

Brandlin spent approximately $1,000 of his own money on commercial-grade materials, including 30-inch reflective stop signs matching the other ones on the street. He began installing them himself to replace the yellow posted crosswalk signs on the intersection in the early morning of March 14, according to the El Segundo Police Department.

Police arrested him around 1:30 a.m. while he worked on the second direction of traffic. Brandlin said the arrest was excessive, saying he was cited with multiple charges, including felonies.

The charges include interfering with a traffic control device, grand theft, and vandalism exceeding $400, Sgt. Paul Saldana of the El Segundo Police Department said.

Joseph Brandlin said he asked the city to install the stop signs but the city ignored his concerns.

He was taken to a nearby jail and released later the morning of March 14, with a citation, according to police. His court date is scheduled for June.

Despite the legal consequences, several residents expressed support for Brandlin’s actions and expressed broader concerns about safety.

“I think it is a huge issue,” said Amanda Pruett, a local nanny and parent. “Our kids’ safety is very important.”

Pruett said she has frequently witnessed unsafe driving in the area and believes additional stop signs could help reduce risk.

Numerous residents told a Times reporter that they’ve seen dangerous driving through that intersection for years, and one said their cat was hit by a car.

Following Brandlin’s arrest, residents quickly organized. Brandlin gathered 73 letters in 24 hours from nearby households urging the city to take action.

On March 17, he presented the letters at a City Council meeting held days after his release.

“I’m asking the council for a straightforward action to install stop signs on intersection of Loma Vista Street and Acacia Avenue, or complete and transparent evaluation with the community,” Brandlin said.

The incident prompted debate about how cities respond to community safety concerns and what happens when residents feel ignored.

El Segundo resident Joseph Brandlin was arrested after installing unauthorized stop signs at a neighborhood intersection.

Brandlin said he has reached out to city officials but has not received a response.

“The city just wasn’t listening,” he said.

El Segundo officials did not respond to a request for comment from The Times.

Brandlin’s case is not an isolated incident. Across Los Angeles, residents and activists have increasingly taken street safety into their own hands, often out of frustration with delays in city response.

In Sawtelle, community members painted crosswalks near Stoner Park after raising concerns about pedestrian safety in an area frequented by families, schools and day cares. The city initially removed the markings, citing accessibility requirements, before later reversing course and installing permanent crosswalks following public outcry.

Similar efforts have appeared in Koreatown, where a group of activists painted a crosswalk at an intersection where a 9-year-old boy was fatally struck by a vehicle. The action was part of a broader movement by residents who say safety improvements often take too long or never come at all.

Tensions between residents and city officials have led to arrests.

In Westwood, an activist with the group People’s Vision Zero was cited for vandalism while painting a crosswalk without a permit, highlighting the legal risks of unauthorized safety efforts.

As Brandlin’s case moves forward, the intersection remains unchanged, and residents continue to push for the installation of stop signs.

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Elderly couple dies in Santa Monica home fire

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The Santa Monica Fire Department is investigating an early-morning blaze on Sunday that claimed the lives of an elderly couple living in a two-story home.

The department has yet to release the identities of the victims who lived in the older English Tudor-style home in the 500 block of Lincoln Boulevard, but their relatives have been notified, according to A Platoon Battalion Chief James Altman.

Firefighters responded to a call shortly before 3 a.m. and found the home engulfed in flames.

Altman said fire crews found two bodies in the first-floor bedroom of the residence. The victims were pronounced dead at the scene.

The couple at the residence were in their 90s and usually had a caretaker with them. But no one was on duty at the time, Altman said.

The department has yet to determine a cause for the fire, Altman said.

The Lincoln Boulevard blaze was Santa Monica’s second fatal residential blaze in recent months. An elderly man died after a June 5 fire broke out in a second-floor apartment in a building in the 2600 block of 5th Street.

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Israel Rejects Trump’s 15-Point Plan to Disarm Hamas

President Trump’s Board of Peace announced an agreement last month that aimed at Hamas’s giving up its weapons alongside an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

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Astronomers Find a New Object from the Early Universe Using Webb Data

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Since it became operational in 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released some truly breathtaking views of the cosmos. These images highlight how advancements since the days of the venerable Hubble Space Telescope are now providing the deepest and clearest views of the cosmos to date. This was especially evident with the galaxy cluster MACS J0308.9+2645, a deep field image originally taken by Hubble showcasing galaxy clusters and several gravitational lenses.

These lenses, in turn, revealed even more distant galaxies that existed 13 billion years ago, when the Universe was just 1 billion years old. These galaxies appear as distorted “gravitational arcs” in the image, their light having been warped and amplified by the MACS J0308.9+2645 cluster’s gravitational field. As it turns out, there were more galaxies remaining to be found. In a recent paper, astrophysicist Homer Dávila Gutierrez identified another gravitational arc candidate in the galaxy cluster MACS J0308.9+2645.

Dr. Gutierrez is the founder and director of SKYCR.ORG, the leading Spanish-language news source for astronomy and space exploration, the first Costa Rican elected Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS), and a member of the European Astronomical Society (EAS). He reported the finding of the arc candidate (A1) after searching through JWST archival Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) data gathered through Webb’s General Observation (GO) 5293 campaign.

A conceptual diagram of the gravitational lens system MG J0414+0534. Credit: NAOJ, K. T. Inoue

Gravitational lenses are a phenomenon originally predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, in which objects with mass alter the curvature of spacetime around them. When light intersects with a gravitational field, it traces this curvature, which amplifies and distorts it. For decades, astronomers have used these lenses (created by objects in the foreground) to observe light from more distant, fainter objects located behind them.

The galaxy candidate Dr. Gutierrez observed is characteristic of this phenomenon, having an elongated and curved morphology. He found A1 while searching through 54 public JWST/NIRCam fields and evaluating 1,591 possible candidates. Of these, only A1 was considered a robust candidate for a gravitational arc that could have existed when the Universe was very young. As Dr. Gutierrez told Universe Today via email, there are three things that make A1 stand out from the rest:

First, its geometry: A1 is extremely elongated (axis ratio ~6.5) and aligned tangentially with respect to the cluster center to within about a degree – exactly the orientation gravitational lensing produces. Second, its brightness: it is the brightest of the highly elongated sources at that radius, which made it measurable. And third, its absence from every catalog: it does not appear in the published strong-lensing inventory of this cluster, nor in SIMBAD, NED, or VizieR. \

When I contacted the GO-5293 team, they confirmed it did not overlap with the systems they were analyzing. A real, bright, uncatalogued arc-like source in a massive Planck-selected cluster – that is what made it worth pursuing.

After conducting a multi-band analysis with the EAZY (Easy and Accurate Zphot from Yale) photometric tool, Dr. Gutierrez obtained a redshift value of z ≈ 4.4, placing A1 within the first billion years of the Universe. This was followed by analysis with the tool developed by Israeli astrophysicist Ana Acebron and collaborators in 2018 that placed constraints on the mass of the MACS J0308.9+2645 cluster. From this, he determined that A1 was subject to a magnification factor of seven.

The little red dots could represent galaxies in an evolutionary phase predating the luminous quasar phase. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/ISTA)/ETH Zurich/NAOJ

While the analysis is evolving and follow-up observations are needed, there are still some characteristics that can be gleaned from the data. Said Dr, Gutierrez:

With the corrected photometry, A1 is a galaxy at z ≈ 1.4 — we see it as it was roughly 9 billion years ago — lying behind the cluster MACS J0308.9+2645 (z = 0.356), one of the most massive clusters known. Its light passed close to the cluster on its way to us, and the working interpretation, shared by the program team’s lensing experts, is that it is a singly lensed image: stretched and modestly magnified by the cluster’s gravity, but not multiply imaged.

Its projected position, about 51 arcseconds from the cluster’s X-ray center, and its tangential elongation are consistent with that picture. The definitive test — an updated lens model of the cluster built from the new JWST data — is in progress.

The analysis also revealed a second potential candidate, designed A2, which has similar geometry to A1. This light source is significantly fainter, smaller, more elongated, and its photometry is less constrained. It also has a similar projected distance from the central cluster as A1. “And that matters: the photometric issue that affected A1’s original redshift estimate — catalog aperture magnitudes that capture only a small fraction of an extended source’s light — applies even more strongly to a faint source like A2. So I treat its nature and redshift as open questions pending the same corrected reanalysis I applied to A1,” said Dr. Gutierrez.

The exciting thing about these results is that they imply that there could be many more early galaxy candidates hiding in Webb’s data.

Webb’s public archive is growing faster than anyone can fully exploit, and this find shows that genuine discoveries are sitting in already-released data, accessible to any researcher willing to do careful work. But there is a second lesson, just as important: automated catalog photometry can badly mislead you for extended sources — in this case it initially suggested a much higher redshift — so verification, independent remeasurement, and contact with the original program team are essential.

The most rewarding part of this process has been exactly that: the GO-5293 team responded generously, confirmed the object was uncatalogued, and we are now working with their updated lens model to establish A1’s nature definitively. Independent researchers and program teams collaborating over public data — that is Webb’s archive working exactly as intended.

The work is currently being reviewed for publication in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Further Reading: arXiv, SKYCR