"Eunisses Hernandez Ignored COVID Guidelines, Endangering Thousands. Her Dubious Explanation Raises Red Flags" by Daniel Guss
Silence from the LAPD and City Hall raises even more of them.
@TheGussReport — First-year LA City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez is, at minimum, a hypocrite.
As I wrote on Friday, she ignored well-established CDC and California Department of Public Health COVID guidelines last week when she showed up maskless in City Hall, just days after she had claimed that she tested positive, putting hundreds of City Hall visitors, employees and honorees in harm’s way, including seven-time Olympic gold medalist Allyson Felix and members of the USC marching band, and countless others who may have come in contact with them, while urging others on social media to practice COVID safety.
For Hernandez, hypocrisy is a best case scenario, because her timeline and explanation defy logic, and the potential ramifications are sobering, to say the least.
In order to understand, let’s build our own timeline.
Last Wednesday, the twice-monthly committee meeting that Hernandez chairs was scheduled to discuss the extremely overcrowded and wretchedly maintained LA Animal Services, so let’s start with that:
Wed Sept 27 - Hernandez committee meeting scheduled for 8:30am
Add-in the prior two dates the meeting had already been scrapped, on September 6th and again on the 20th, just as I exposed allegations that Jeremy Prupas, LAAS’s chief veterinarian, and LA Times reporter Dakota Smith had for at least a year ignored the ever-worsening conditions at LAAS:
Wed Sept 6 - Hernandez committee meeting canceled
Tue Sept 12 - Guss exposé on Prupas and Smith
Wed Sept 20 - Hernandez committee meeting canceled
Wed Sept 27 - Hernandez committee meeting scheduled for 8:30am
To date, Hernandez’s office refuses to state why the meeting kept getting canceled.
On Monday morning September 25th, I published this column, saying that the LA County District Attorney had for months been investigating those cruel conditions as well as alleged misuse of more than $1 million in funds that had been donated for the care and comfort of those animals. So let’s insert that, as such:
Wed Sept 6 - Hernandez committee meeting canceled
Tue Sept 12 - Guss exposé on Prupas and Smith
Wed Sept 20 - Hernandez committee meeting canceled
Mon Sept 25 - Guss exposé on District Attorney investigation published at 8:45am
Wed Sept 27 - Hernandez committee meeting scheduled for 8:30am
At 5:18pm on the 25th, Hernandez tweeted that she has canceled the meeting a third time, due to her testing positive for COVID, even though it could have been held with a quorum, though if she wished, she could have attended it remotely. That builds our timeline like this:
Wed Sept 6 - Hernandez committee meeting canceled
Tue Sept 12 - Guss exposé on Prupas and Smith
Wed Sept 20 - Hernandez committee meeting canceled
Mon Sept 25 - Guss exposé on District Attorney investigation published at 8:45am
Mon Sept 25 - Hernandez cancels meeting again in tweet announcing her catching COVID. This was at 5:18pm.
Wed Sept 27 - Hernandez committee meeting scheduled for 8:30am - now canceled for a third time.
But just four days later (i.e. last Friday, Sept. 29th), Hernandez showed up to the full City Council meeting, maskless and casually chatting with scores of people, including her colleagues Heather Hutt and Marqueece Harris-Dawson, as detailed in my contemporaneous column:
Wed Sept 6 - Hernandez committee meeting canceled
Tue Sept 12 - Guss exposé on Prupas and Smith
Wed Sept 20 - Hernandez committee meeting canceled
Mon Sept 25 - Guss exposé on District Attorney investigation published at 8:45am
Mon Sept 25 - Hernandez cancels meeting in tweet announcing her positive COVID test. That was at 5:18pm.
Wed Sept 27 - Hernandez committee meeting scheduled for 8:30am - now canceled for a third time.
Fri Sept 29 - Hernandez emerges maskless at City Council at 10am despite CDC and CDPH protocols.
According to the California Department of Public Health’s COVID calculator, Hernandez should have isolated for five days starting on Tuesday the 26th through Saturday the 30th, followed by five additional days of masking, provided that she was asymptomatic, instead of gallivanting maskless around the City Council meeting on Friday the 29th.
I spent much of Friday seeking answers from Hernandez for her reckless actions and proof of what, if any, precautions she took to warn those with whom she came in contact to get tested.
I asked the same of those who sat within inches of her on Friday, including Hutt, Harris-Dawson, Council president Paul Krekorian and LAPD Chief Michel Moore and his media relations people, since they were responsible for the safety of hundreds of people who may have come in contact with her. I also reached out to Zack Seidl and Chris Thompson, Mayor Karen Bass’s communications deputy and chief of staff, respectively.
Surely, these press release-happy souls warned everyone who might have been exposed to Hernandez’s COVID, right?
Their collective response was a deafening silence that implied that they knew that Hernandez was not contagious, or they collectively approved of ignoring CDC and CDPH guidelines.
Only in LA City Hall will you find such predictable groupthink.
On Friday evening, I heard from Hernandez’s office
My prodding finally resulted in a Friday evening email from Chelsea Lucktenberg, who is Hernandez’s communications director.
She wrote that Hernandez, “first tested positive on 9/23/23 and began testing negative on 9/26/23 and remained working from home throughout the recommended isolation period before returning to work.”
Before we dissect this claim, let’s take Lucktenberg at her word and plug those dates into the CDPH calculator and, again, assume the best case scenario that Hernandez was asymptomatic.
According to Lucktenberg’s own timeline, Hernandez should have been masked at City Council, for five days starting on the 29th, but roamed around the meeting maskless.
Lucktenberg also refused to explain the following:
Why Hernandez — if she tested positive on September 23rd — waited until Monday the 25th at 5:18pm (i.e. just hours after my exclusive on the DA’s investigation into LA Animal Services) to announce her positive COVID test?
Why Hernandez refused to state both subsequent dates that she allegedly tested negative, and why she hadn’t announced it on social media?
Why Hernandez showed up unmasked at City Council on the 29th when, at minimum, she should have been masked (assuming she had to be in City Hall at all) until October 3rd, or until October 5th, if one goes by the date she announced on Twitter that she had COVID?
But what’s really ludicrous is that after that email dialogue with Lucktenberg, with Hernandez and her chief of staff Ivette Serna cc’d, over the weekend, Hernandez attended other public events, unmasked despite CDC and CDPH guidelines that say she should be masked until later this week.
At an absolute minimum, Hernandez has demonstrated utter contempt for the welfare and safety of hundreds of people who came in contact with her over the past week, and thousands of other people by extension.
Or, Hernandez didn’t test positive for COVID at all, but only said so as a way to dodge a thrice-canceled meeting about an initiative that just hours earlier I wrote was “doomed-to-fail.”
Otherwise, why did she wait until 5:18pm on Monday the 25th to announce a positive COVID test she claims she took on Saturday the 23rd?
If that’s what happened here, there could be criminal liability for Hernandez and any other public official who knowingly went along with it.
Since none of the City Hall parties I contacted would voluntarily say whether they warned the public of their exposure to Hernandez, I submitted public records requests to each of them to find out definitively, and for Hernandez’s calendar for all of last week.
And finally…
Toward the end of the pandemic, I was contacted by dozens of government employees who were on the verge of being fired because they, too, refused to follow COVID guidelines.
What will the city now do for them?
What if others ignore the guidelines in a future outbreak?
Stay tuned.
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(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a multi-award-winning journalist. In June ‘23, he won the LA Press Club’s “Online Journalist of the Year” and “Best Activism Journalism” awards. He has been City Editor for the Mayor Sam network, and a featured contributor for CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)