Careful calling 911 in Sacramento. The first responder may try to buy your home | Opinion
What does it take to get fired from the Sacramento Fire Department?
An investigation unearthed by The Bee’s Mathew Miranda found that firefighters Douglas Muraki and Michael Mora failed to disclose to the city that they had a side job flipping homes. They used city time and equipment to renovate a home purchased from a 69-year-old woman under the most disturbing of circumstances. And to further thumb their noses at the city that employs them, they failed on at least eight occasions to get the required city permits to do the renovations.
The city apparently tried to fire Mora at first. Yet that didn’t happen. The mountain of evidence of wrongdoing from the independent investigation, for some reason, wasn’t enough. Mora remains on the force, as does Muraki.
In the private sector, this kind of behavior gets somebody fired several times over and a referral to Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho, who should be paying attention to this. But he won’t.
Yet in the public sector, particularly for public safety employees like firefighters, incidents like this too often result in the equivalent of a slap on the wrist for Mora and Muraki. It speaks to a troubling double standard. And it simply invites more bad behavior.
This is a stain on a fire department that is doubling as the first responders to issues involving the city’s homeless. Firefighting in Sacramento is no walk in the park, but moonlighting on the job and violating city policies and procedures along the way is unacceptable.
The circumstances surrounding this 69-year-old woman, the late Christie Evangelista of North Sacramento, are the most troubling of all. She called 911 for help, and it ultimately resulted in a real estate transaction involving one of the first responders, Muraki.
Evangelista’s son says his mother was grappling with the onset of dementia and the lingering effects of chemotherapy to battle two cancers. She reportedly mentioned to Muraki that she was thinking of selling the home. He then returned at least four more times to the property while on duty.
He and other firefighters had created a home-flipping company known as Good Neighbors Investors. Evangelista soon sold the home to the company for $200,000, netting $21,000 in cash. Four months later, after renovations, the home sold for $460,000.
Evangelista moved into a senior living home where she was living when she died in February. Good Neighbors Investors, meanwhile, has since gone out of business.
The son, Brandon Evangelista, didn’t know his mother had sold the home until the transaction was over. He has some pretty strong feelings about what happened and understandably so.
“I feel these guys should be fired and prosecuted for taking advantage of people in hard times to fill their pockets,” he said to Miranda in a written statement. “They should have been made examples for others not to do.”
But that’s not what happened inside the Sacramento Fire Department, where the men continue to work. This whole episode has resulted in a far different message: That rules are merely suggestions inside the city of Sacramento and its fire department. That it’s OK to moonlight on the job and forget to tell the city. That independent investigations that find wrongdoing are a waste of taxpayer money, because nothing of consequence is going to happen.