HAULING IN HELP » FEMA trailers arrive in Santa Rosa to aid homeless solutions. A3

EIGHT IN A ROW » Warriors fall to Lakers 116-86 as losing streak strains morale. C1

SOUND OF WOMEN » Dirty Cello gathers female artists to rock the Hopmonk. D1

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2020 • SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA • PRESSDEMOCRAT.COM

W I N N E R O F T H E 2 0 1 8 P U L I T Z E R P R I Z E

SANTA ROSAHigh 72, Low 40THE WEATHER, C8

Advice B7Business B8Classified D7

Comics B6Crossword B7Editorial A8

Horoscopes B5Lotto A2Movies D6

Nation-World B1Obituaries B3SonomaGo D1

WINERY ACQUISITION: Parent company of Gundlach Bundschu said it has purchased Rancho Agua Caliente in Sonoma Valley / B8

©2020 The Press Democrat

SR credit union hires good Samaritan fired by US Bank

Emily James, by all accounts, is uncommonly generous. On Christmas Eve, she paid dearly for it.

A senior customer service of-ficer at a U.S. Bank call center in Portland, Oregon, she was on the phone with a customer in distress.

He’d deposited his paycheck, but the bank put a hold on it.

Earlier in the day, he’d been assured the hold would be lifted, and that he’d soon be able to buy gifts for his children. It wasn’t. Stranded at a gas station, his tank empty, he called the bank and spoke to James, who tried to get the hold lift-ed. Unable to do that, she drove 20 minutes — on her break — and handed him $20.

Instead of celebrating her for

that stellar customer service, U.S. Bank fired her, along with the man-ager who approved the trip, for an unautho-rized interaction with a customer.

In a twist reminiscent of “It’s Wonderful Life,” the 33-year-old good Sa-maritan has landed on

her feet — in Santa Rosa. Im-pressed by her willingness to go above and beyond the call of

duty, Community First Cred-it Union invited James to fly down for a series of interviews. A week later, Community First offered her a job as a training specialist.

“Their attitude was, ‘Hey, we see that this person cares, and that’s the kind of person we want working for us,’ ” said James, who has lived in Port-land for the last 25 years.

Community First was im-pressed by James’ willingness

to go above and beyond the call. “This is something we encour-age,” said David Williams, the credit union’s marketing chief. “We try to hire people with that sort of helpful DNA.”

How soon does she start?“As soon as I find a place to

live,” James said.By coincidence, Community

First had bestowed its most re-cent Employee of the Quarter

By AUSTIN MURPHYThe PRESS DEMOCRAT

TURN TO SAMARITAN » PAGE A2

Emily James

KENT PORTER / THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

A security guard hired by Lululemon patrols Feb. 14 in front of the business’s branch in Montgomery Village, which has been robbed several times.

Heists target retailers

CHP sets up task force as high-profile thefts fuel lucrative black market

It only took a couple of minutes, but the group of unarmed thieves who entered the Lululemon store in Santa Rosa’s

Montgomery Village shopping center last June certainly scored.

Their haul from the shop was an esti-mated 350 pairs of athletic pants worth about $35,000, police said. The brazen bandits entered the store just past noon, stuffed the loot in bags and said nothing to employees, according to police and prosecutors.

They fled in a black Nissan Altima, elud-ing officers who had been alerted about the robbery.

Last week, more than eight months after the June 11 heist, three East Bay women were formally charged in Sonoma County

Superior Court for the crime. Elexis Monique Meadores, 29, China

Japeirah Omar, 20, both of Oakland, and Jasmine Porsha Hooker, 25, of Pitts-burg each face felony grand theft, felony conspiracy to commit a crime and misde-meanor organized retail theft, court documents show. A Sonoma County judge issued arrest warrants for the women on Monday and none of the three had been taken into custody as of Thursday afternoon, said Sonoma County Chief Deputy District Attorney Brian Staebell.

The June robbery was one of at least

five reported thefts at the Santa Rosa Lulu-lemon since September 2018, when police said four women stole as much as $19,000

worth of workout clothes before fleeing in a black Mercedes.

The high-profile string of thefts is part of a broader Bay Area and California crime trend — or-ganized heists from retailers — increas-ingly tied to an online black market, where name-brand clothes

especially are proving lucrative for crooks and difficult for investigators to trace.

“The biggest thing with the Lululemon

By NASHELLY CHAVEZ THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

TURN TO RETAIL » PAGE A2

NORTH BAY » THIEVES BECOME BRAZEN

Favored targets include stores carrying name-brand clothes, makeup and other high-end consumer products, authorities said.

Race to track patient’s contacts

VACAVILLE — California has launched a far-reaching ef-fort to find anyone who might have come in contact with a new coronavirus patient infected despite having no known link to others with the illness, as

federal officials tried to fix the faulty testing process that has ham-strung their ability to track how widely the disease is spreading.

U.S. officials raced to meet the daunting new challenge of a virus that could be spreading through a Northern California commu-nity, even as the covid-19 virus continued its relentless march around the globe. Stock mar-kets continued to plunge, Japan initiated a weekslong school

closure and an Iranian lawmaker contracted the infection. From the Middle East to South Korea to parts of Eu-rope, the number of deaths and infections continued to grow.

In Washington, Vice President Mike Pence convened his first meeting as the new head of the task force battling the virus. On the other side of the country, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and state health officials sought

to reassure jittery residents that public health officials would be able to handle the first U.S. case of community transmission.

Projecting an air of calm during a moment of rising anx-iety over the outbreak, Newsom repeatedly told reporters that methods of tracing a Solano County woman’s contacts have been honed in response to other public health crises, from tuber-culosis to the swine flu.

“This is not our first great challenge as it relates to public health,” Newsom said. “Quite

the contrary. These protocols have been perfected.”

Federal officials have faced fierce criticism for overly nar-row criteria about who should be tested and for shipping coro-navirus test kits to public health labs that included a component that in most cases did not work correctly.

But on Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Pre-vention expanded the federal guidelines for testing to include

COVID-19 » Officials plan to identify who may be exposed as virus spreadsBy GEOFFREY A. FOWLER AND LENNY BERNSTEINWASHINGTON POST

TURN TO VIRUS » PAGE A6

INSIDEWorkers without protective gear assisted evacuees infected with coronavirus, whistleblower claims / B1

Markets continue to drop sharply

The Dow Jones industrial av-erage plunged nearly 1,200 points on Thursday, capping its worst four days since the 2008 finan-cial crisis, as investors conclud-ed global efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus were failing.

The Dow closed at 25,767 on Thursday, down 4.4%. The Stan-dard & Poor’s 500 and the tech-rich Nasdaq also dove. The Dow is now nearly 13% off its recent high. Its 10-day plunge is the swiftest dive by the blue chips since 2011.

“Every day we think we could be near a bottom, and every day we are not,” Helane Becker, an analyst at the financial services firm Cowen, wrote in a note Thursday.

In a blink, Wall Street’s free-fall this week erased one-third of stocks’ gain since President Don-ald Trump’s November 2016 elec-tion. Amid mounting criticism of the administration’s handling of the epidemic, the president suddenly finds himself battling a medical, economic and political emergency.

The health challenge was un-derscored by confirmation in California of the first U.S. case that could not be linked to trav-el to China or to contact with a known coronavirus patient. On the economic front, Facebook canceled its largest annual de-veloper conference while manu-facturers worried about Chinese suppliers that have not yet re-sumed normal production.

Some Wall Street veterans said the virus was an external

VIRUS FEARS » Dow down 4.4% in 10-day plunge, fastest since 2011By DAVID J. LYNCH, RACHEL SIEGEL AND THOMAS HEATHWASHINGTON POST

TURN TO MARKETS » PAGE A6