San Rafael Saga: What Did We Learn? Not Much.

OPINION

Three months removed from the collision among a Pasadena principal, public school officials, police, a private security detail, politicians and parents, the most unsettling remnant from the dustup is the damage done to the most innocent of all — our children.

A nosy neighbor makes an erroneous if not egregious 9-1-1 call without personal repercussions for doing so. Police officers traumatize and detain an innocent custodian — quite possibly because he is Latino — without repercussions for doing so. A public school principal calls women fucking punks and bitches without repercussions for doing so. Despite commanding a Spanish immersion school, he peppers his vitriol with derogatory remarks about beleaguered immigrants without repercussions for doing so.

A district superintendent and his school board unilaterally decide to retain the embattled principal — despite this second go-round of vile behavior — without repercussions for doing so. A private security contractor for the school system illegally records and distributes a video without repercussions for doing so. A mayor, city manager and police department widely and willfully distribute that illegally recorded video — including a mother and child of the school — without repercussions for doing so.

The truth is, we actually condone the very behavior we condemn. The truth is, our community is further bound by the bulwark of cowardice. The truth is, everything about this event and its aftermath was an indictment of fundamental civility.

Pasadena reeks of influence-peddling, of petty political gamesmanship, of tribalism-cum-intolerance, of an exaggerated divide between the haves and have-nots, of favoring football stadiums and private schools over encumbered families and publicly funded classrooms.

Since a public school principal can call women fucking punks and bitches with impunity, we are telling our male children to do the same to their female classmates. Since the police can traumatize an obvious innocent with amnesty, we are telling our children to manhandle fellow vulnerable students in the same manner.

Since our politicians can release ill-begotten videos to publicly shame anyone at any time, we are telling our children to similarly humiliate any peer in their path. Since our school superintendent and board can arbitrarily decide to quash any voice of dissent, we are telling our children to muzzle or manhandle those with which they disagree.

And when a part-time investigative journalist like me, who is also a taxpayer, has to repeatedly and futilely ask people like publicly funded Lisa Derderian or publicly funded Jason Clawson or publicly funded Victor Gordo or publicly funded Brian McDonald or any city agency gatekeeper for straight answers to questions about fundamental policies or opinions, we are telling our children to abandon accountability for the sake of protecting the powerful.

Speaking of power, Steve Madison is Pasadena’s District Six councilman. I live in the district. Apparently, the moral high ground is no object for folks like Madison, but power and control certainly are.

Two years ago, Madison deemed it appropriate to become the attorney of record in the state’s lawsuit against the DiMassa family — friends of his who are responsible for my daughter’s brutal death while operating an illegal child care facility, according to the Attorney General.

Nobody on the council seemed to have urged Madison away from the conflict of moral and political interest. Nobody in media seemed to opine that, while Madison’s actions might be technically allowable, they were infinitely reprehensible.

No Pasadena gatekeeper seemed to have thought that Madison could have taken the highest of high roads, since money is apparently no object for the attorney who defended the relentlessly villainous LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva and who is a partner in a firm that rakes in well over a billion in annual billings.

I confronted Madison at an event last year. He looked like a deer in a train’s headlights once I told him who I was and how he has blatantly disregarded if not abetted our family’s suffering. Madison never so much as proactively offered any condolences after the wholly preventable and high profile death of his 6-year-old constituent, let alone her parents.

Yet again, politically or professionally driven favors from friends in high places are the rule rather than the exception around these parts.

My daughter was a beloved student at San Rafael Elementary where Madison invested a great deal of time over the years plying votes for his council seat. In fact, I saw Madison at San Rafael in 2020. He and three other District Six candidates debated issues shortly before the election.

Unlike any other candidate, Madison was disdainful if not disparaging to the sole female candidate on the panel, Tamerlin Godley. I distinctly remember how impressive it was to witness Godley take his embarrassing malevolence in stride.

Nonetheless, Pasadenans subsequently sustained the status quo by returning Madison to the seat he has now occupied for more than two decades. Why a polity preserves those who hardly reflect their true interests is a question for the ages. The status quo is what sucks the bright from the future.

I returned to a graduate studies program in journalism to unmask teflon-coated herds oft comprised of men like Madison. Such persons pledge to thwart inequities when they are, in fact, the arsonists who claim to be heroes for dousing their own fires.

Therefore, while this personal anecdote about someone like Madison might appear petty, I wage it because this is what we have come to as a general public — enabling the moneyed, the unchecked egos and the political puppeteers to flourish while the constituent flounders.

Perhaps we herald the well-heeled for fear that they may break us in a blink if we threatened their stockpile or aired their filthy laundry. Time and again, when we upbraid obvious disgraces with an arsenal of facts to support such admonitions, power and protectionism override truth.

My now deceased wife and I spent a fair amount of time with San Rafael principal Ramirez. As both cheerleader and aficionado, he helped brand San Rafael as, arguably, the public school with the most mojo district-wide.

He and my daughter also engaged in a manner that was equal parts spirited and supportive. And after Summerkids camp killed Roxie, Rudy helped rally the school community around us on multiple occasions. In June, he appeared at my wife’s celebration of life.

Sadly, my wife and I also remembered being a party to any number of conversations that, in hindsight, were well beyond the confines of appropriate fodder, wherein his denigration of others was commonly at play. His video remarks about his own school parent made my heart sink to my sneakers. It made me wonder if anyone is fair game for such runaway hostility.

Following his halfhearted-apology-cum-self-promotion performance at the debacle of a town hall mediation meeting, I realized the community was firmly in a place where adults savage one another like the petulant children they decry.

My daughter died because a family prioritized profiteering and self-promotion over fundamental child protection. The beating heart of a school community dies when adults prioritize personal aspirations over the protection of a common good — the future of our progeny.

As I have maintained, Pasadena is indeed a city of roses, but its buds are and have been far outnumbered by its wretched thorns.