Dan Morain is a former Los Angeles Times reporter as well as Sacramento Bee editorial page editor. His book about mental healthcare will be published in 2027. A longer version of this article originally appeared on Morain’s Substack page.
At noon on a recent Friday, a woman sat on a narrow median at a busy intersection near a Home Depot in Sacramento. Her brown hair was frazzled, her eyes were dark, and she held a cardboard sign too weathered to read.
Her name is Califia Carlisle, Cali for short. She is 32, but after a decade on the streets, she looks much older. Although she sits at the same spot most days asking for money from the motorists who stop at the left-turn light, she exists at many intersections.
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One is the obvious, the busy crossroads of Folsom Boulevard and Power Inn Road, east of the Capitol. A second is more complex: the intersection of severe mental illness, drug abuse and chronic homelessness, and the efforts, so far failed, of the state of California and city and county of Sacramento to help a woman who clearly needs care.
A third intersection is the one between a grasping New Jersey hedge fund’s thirst for returns on its investment and the unraveling of a once-excellent news organization, the Sacramento Bee.
We know about Cali because veteran journalist Tom Philp, working with Bee photographer Renée C. Byer, spent months getting to know her and her family. That family includes a baby Cali bore two years ago in a parking lot behind a Sacramento liquor store. Laura Alicia Carlisle arrived addicted to fentanyl. Cali’s father, Christopher, and his wife, Anne, are raising Laura, while they fight to help her birth mother.
Philp detailed the Carlisle family story in a five-part series in the Bee that concluded on Sept. 25. That was his final day at the Bee.
In a short-sighted cost-cutting move, Chatham Asset Management, which owns the Bee, decreed that dozens of journalists be axed. Reporters are an odd bunch, so much so that some will do what they do for free, if they must. Philp is one of those.
“I have unfinished business, and I owe it to the dad, the mom and Califia to get the county to help this woman,” Philp told me.
Robin Epley
And so a month after he was forced out of the Bee’s newsroom, while receiving unemployment compensation, Philp delivered an update — at no cost to Chatham Asset Management — detailing an extraordinary Sacramento City Council hearing convened by Mayor Kevin McCarty focused on the state of the city’s behavioral healthcare.
Sacramento, California’s sixth largest city, has about 4,000 people who are homeless, a large population by many measures, though far from the largest among California’s big cities. After McCarty and his predecessor, Darrell Steinberg, focused on the issue, sprawling tent encampments disappeared. But as the capital of the state that boasts of having the world’s fourth-largest economy, Sacramento’s homeless crisis takes on outsized symbolism.
At McCarty’s request, Brian Pedro, director of Sacramento’s Department of Community Response, which is responsible for combating chronic homelessness, delivered the story by way of statistics.
The Sacramento Fire Department responded to 19,020 homeless- and behavioral-health-related calls in 2025. That’s 52 per day. The Department of Community Response answered another 6,191 calls. That’s 17 per day.
On an average day in 2025, emergency responders, usually police officers or firefighters, transported 30 people in the throes of some sort of severe mental illness crisis to Sacramento County hospital emergency rooms — 10,836 ER visits in all. The number of individuals is smaller. Some people were delivered multiple times.
Sacramento County “public guardians” filed 156 petitions with Superior Court judges to place individuals into conservatorship, which means they would be closely monitored or cared for at least a year. Only 55 petitions were granted.
Golden State staff
In 2017, Cali’s father, Christopher Carlisle, tried without success to have her placed into a conservatorship. A few years later, he thought he could help her by using another process known as CARE Court, short for Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment. Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed to create the system by legislation in 2022, his most high-profile effort to confront the scourge of untreated mental illness and chronic homelessness.
It took effect in 2024 and is a work in progress.
In the CARE system, judges cannot compel treatment for people who, like Cali, refuse it. It is a voluntary process. As of Pedro’s presentation, Sacramento County officials had filed 216 CARE Court petitions, and 100 cases were pending. Only one person in Sacramento had completed the program.
In many instances, people on whose behalf petitions were filed could not be located. In other instances, judges or social workers concluded individuals didn’t meet the criteria. Some petitions were dismissed after individuals agreed to seek help without court intervention. But most of the time, the individuals refused to participate.
After listening to Pedro, Councilmember Eric Guerra, whose district includes the median where Cali sits, likened the process to Chutes and Ladders, the frustrating children’s board game in which players inevitably fall through chutes as they attempt to complete a winding path. Guerra knows the situation is not a game.
One of his cousins, Arturo, was an accomplished auto mechanic and painter, and the father of two. He also heard voices, used drugs and sometimes lashed out, once at Guerra himself. Arturo lived for years on Sacramento streets. About 15 years ago, Guerra heard Arturo was homeless in Reseda.
“We don’t know whether they’re alive or not,” Guerra said of Arturo at the council meeting.
Golden State staff
Guerra, like McCarty, believes CARE Court rules and other laws that apply to homelessness need to be tightened so that people most in need can be compelled to accept care. But some legislators — Philp singled out Assemblywoman Mia Bonta (D-Alameda), chair of the Assembly Health Committee and wife of Attorney General Rob Bonta — blunted recent CARE Court reform legislation by keeping it a voluntary program.
Under Newsom, California began to expand its power to treat the mentally ill. Starting in January, California’s next governor — almost certainly Xavier Becerra — will determine whether that effort, and in particular the CARE Court, limps along, withers or is made more effective. Becerra has so far not made his position clear.
“Cali is dying on the streets because there is no way … to help her,” Anne Carlisle told the Sacramento City Council.
The same day, police arrested Cali. She evidently was in possession of drugs. But the Bee reported that before she could appear in court, the Sacramento County district attorney declined to file charges, and she returned to the streets.
Because of Philp’s work, Califia Carlisle has become the face of homelessness in Sacramento. The mayor and City Council members know her story. She cannot be ignored. Saving her won’t be easy. But the alternative is leaving her stranded at intersections that only lead to a dead end.
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