She was looking for her brother in Skid Row. We found him.

Good morning. It’s Friday, April 24. You can expect partly cloudy skies today with a high of 76. Cooler, grayer days are predicted over the weekend. 

In today’s newsletter, a historic studio is on the verge of sale in Studio City, an earth-shaking Hollywood merger moves forward, and some things to do this weekend. But first, the story of a sister who found her missing brother, with a little assistance from L.A. Material.

“I have a brother on Skid Row, that I'm trying to locate,” Cayce Johnson posted to the AskLosAngeles Reddit page on Tuesday. “Does anyone know of any resources for this kind of thing?”

The post wasn’t completely accurate. Cayce didn’t know if her brother was in Skid Row, or in L.A. — or if he was even alive. She’d had no contact with him for seven years, and she lived across the country in Spartanburg, South Carolina. But she had decided to start looking, and didn’t know where else to begin.

I was also on AskLosAngeles that day, looking for something to write about for this newsletter. I sent Cayce a message and spoke to her by phone later that day.

She and her brother had been adopted by their grandparents when she was one year old, she said, and they’d had a happy childhood together. “He's just one of the smartest people I know, and we just have a lot in common. We were just always on the same wavelength, you know, until we weren't.”

He was ten years older, and left for L.A. when Cayce was a senior in high school. “I asked him if he was excited the night that he left,” she remembered. “He said ‘I'll meet a lot of cool people. Interesting people. Who knows, maybe I'll get enough material to write a book.’”

But her brother had struggled with addiction for years, she told me, and after arriving in Los Angeles, he quickly ended up on the street.

About a year later, Cayce went to California with her grandmother to try and get him to come home. The city left a powerful impression on her. It was not a positive one.

“Once I got into the five-lane traffic in L.A., I told myself then I was never going back to that area again,” she said. “It's just heavy and it's dark and it's oppressive.”

Her brother’s girlfriend helped them find him in Skid Row, and Cayce remembers the reunion clearly. “He was in the car, and he was on heroin, and so he was asleep,” she said. “And when he woke up… he looked me directly in my eyes, and I just remember seeing just pure anger and disgust.”

Cayce, now 25, works in finance at a pharmaceutical distributor based in Spartanburg and serves as Board Treasurer for a disaster relief nonprofit. She’s spent time working through her own family issues, and now feels a pull to find her brother.

“It's just very important to me that this person that's sleeping on the ground every night knows that he has a family that loves him and cares about him, still,” she said.

She reached out to her brother’s former girlfriend first. The message she got back: “good luck” and a laughing emoji. “The response that I gave after that has effectively rendered that relationship useless,” Cayce told me.

With no information to go on, Cayce started touring Skid Row on Google Street View, gathering addresses of what seemed to be shelters or other places where her brother might have been. Then she started mailing out fliers with his name and face on them.

She only heard back from one addressee: the Los Angeles Poverty Department. This is not a government office. It’s a theater group that maintains the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, a collection of articles, videos, and other documents related to the neighborhood.

Henry Apodaca, the group’s Media Archivist, was the one who responded to Cayce. “Her story parallels a lot of people’s experiences here,” he told me — families from around the country looking for someone in the neighborhood. His organization works to counter the narrative of Skid Row as “oblivion’s beach, no man’s land, where someone goes and does not return,” he told me. They preserve documentation so that people and places in the neighborhood don’t get lost. He offered to distribute Cayce’s flier, but he also cautioned her that sometimes people whose families are looking for them don’t want to be found.

Cayce said she was prepared for that. “I think that it's something that needs to be understood, just more generally, that loving an addict doesn't mean expecting an addict to come home and be fixed,” she told us. “It means saying, ‘Hey, I'm just glad that I know you're breathing today. Would you like a hamburger?’”

As Cayce told me about her brother, and how she hadn’t heard from him for years, I started to regret having reached out to her. The odds of him being alive, in L.A., and findable seemed very remote. I idly started searching Superior Court records while we spoke to avoid inquiring with the County Coroner’s office.

His name turned up right away — as an inmate at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, two miles from the Skid Row neighborhood Cayce had been searching on Street View. I didn’t say anything to her on the phone, because I wasn’t sure it was him. But cross-referencing his birthdate and other information confirmed it.

By total coincidence, her brother had been arrested last month: his first interaction with the local justice system since 2019, the last year she saw him. He’d been picked up on a bench warrant for a seven-year outstanding drug possession charge.

She was quieter on the phone than I expected when I gave her the news. Finding out that her brother was alive, Cayce told me later in an email, left her floored: “Step one was to smoke a joint, go to bed, wake up this morning, and see if it was all actually real.” One of the first things she did was mail him a letter, to “let him know that I am not asking him to change anything he's not quite ready to change.” She also bought him a cookie and some toiletries from the jail commissary.

I haven’t spoken to Cayce’s brother — two hours on hold with the Sheriff’s Department visitation line did not result in a conversation with anyone or a call back. But after trying every number she could find, Cayce was able to talk to him on Thursday morning.

He called her less than an hour after she’d left her information with a deputy at Twin Towers. “It was good,” she told me yesterday. “I was excited to hear his voice, and that it was him. He was there.” The conversation lasted only three minutes before he had to go, but Cayce saw it as a beginning.

“He said goodbye, I love you, and I’ll talk to you later,” she said. “So that was cool. I’ll hang on to that.”

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STREAMER THINGS: After rumors circulated earlier this week, Studio City’s historic Radford Studio Center lot is reportedly on the verge of being bought by Netflix for $330 million — a sharp discount from the $1.85 billion it sold for in 2021 before it fell into default earlier this year.

HOUSE OF (RED) CARDS: An envoy to President Trump confirmed Wednesday that he suggested to FIFA that Iran’s national team be replaced in the World Cup by Italy amid the United States’ war against the country. Iran’s team is scheduled to play two group-stage games at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood and, after a previous effort to move its games to Mexico was rejected by FIFA, also put out a statement to the Financial Times Wednesday saying that it plans to participate in the games as scheduled.

BID GAME: Warner Bros shareholders have approved the $81 billion takeover bid from David Ellison’s Paramount, paving the way for an earth-moving merger of two of Hollywood’s most historic studios.

AL PASTORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK: L.A. Taco’s annual “Taco Madness” bracket-based competition has been whittled down from sixty entries to a “Final Cuatro” you can vote on now.

THE PAD IN THE THAI CASTLE: Thai Town celebrates Songkran, the Thai New Year, this Sunday with Muay Thai fights, the crowning of Miss Thai USA 2026, and an attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the most pad thai sold in one hour.

SQUEAKY FINDERS: Curio Club LA, a group that curates unique events, is visiting a fancy pigeon specialist and breeder with more than 500 birds this Sunday at 10:30 a.m. in Reseda. Participants will get to hold and release a homing pigeon. (A hat-tip to Michael McDonald’s newsletter of things to do for this one).

BABY CHAIN-GEAR: Open street bikestravaganza event Ciclavia rolls through West L.A. this Sunday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The route will run along Santa Monica Blvd from Centinela Ave to Westwood Blvd, where it turns North into the heart of Westwood Village.

I THINK YOU SHOULD EAVE: After a one-year hiatus because of the Eaton Fire, Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven tour is back this Sunday with a self-guided stroll through eight historic homes staffed by volunteer docents.

For today’s peek inside our subscriber-only Discord server, a major celebrity is spotted by @wallsallaround in #celebrity-sightings:

AND FINALLY… A poem to pair with your morning coffee: “Highway 90” by Linda Gregg.

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