Tuesday, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office announced that a criminal grand jury indicted 65-year-old Thomas John Loguidice on Dec. 14 on one felony count of kidnapping with the intent to commit robbery. The charge was accompanied by allegations that he used a deadly weapon, threatened great bodily harm, and acted with “a high degree of callousness.”

“We don’t forget victims and we don’t forgive violent crime,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “Our message to our community is that this office will use advancing DNA forensics, detective work, and determination to seek justice.”

Loguidice is serving a 40-year prison sentence following his 2012 conviction in San Benito County for two counts of sexually abusing a child under 14. Until the recent indictment, he was being held in state prison custody at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad.

Jail records show he was transported to the Santa Clara County Main Jail on Thursday, and he is scheduled to be arraigned on the new charge Wednesday in a San Jose courtroom.

Prosecutors say the crime behind the new charge was reported the morning of Jan. 13, 1994 at what is now Westfield Oakridge Mall. Around 10 a.m. a 21-year-old woman working as acting manager at President Tuxedo was getting ready to open the store when a man walked into the showroom, threatened her with a knife, and forced her into a back storage room.

The intruder forced the woman to the ground, bound her wrists and tied her to a pipe, then proceeded to take cash out of the register. Before the man left, authorities say he sexually assaulted the captive woman before running away.

San Jose police detectives investigating the holdup eventually ran out of leads. Deputy District Attorney Rob Baker said that last summer, the cold case unit he leads at the district attorney’s office revisited the Oakridge case as part of a broader review of nearly 300 outstanding sexual assault investigations dating back to the 1990s.

During the new evaluation, they found that a sample of the assailant’s DNA from the original crime scene matched an entry in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System. The entry reportedly belonged to Loguidice, who was required to submit his DNA to the database after his 2011 arrest in connection with the crimes in San Benito County.

After the match, prosecutors determined that they could not charge the sexual assault dimension of the holdup because the statute of limitations for that crime expired in 2000. But Baker said there was a strong enough case to charge Loguidice with kidnapping with intent for robbery, which has no statute of limitations.

Baker added that the office sought a criminal indictment from a grand jury, rather than the typical procedure of directly filing a criminal charge “because of the case age and desire to get to trial as soon as possible.” A grand jury indictment allows prosecutors to bypass a preliminary examination, the court hearing where a judge determines whether charges are fit to proceed to trial.

A conviction on the indictment would add a seven-years-to-life prison term on top of Loguidice’s current prison sentence. He has parole eligibility in 2032, and that would be pushed back by at least seven years if he were found guilty of the new kidnapping charge.

Check back later for updates to this story.

Officers were called at 2:48 a.m. Jan. 1 to an apartment complex near North Jackson Avenue south of Alexian Drive for a report of an assault. They arrived to find a man suffering from serious injuries consistent with being hit by a vehicle, according to San Jose police.

The injured man was rushed to a local hospital, and police said he was initially expected to survive, but he died Sunday. He was identified by the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office as 52-year-old Ernest Pino Valenzuela.

An assault investigation started shortly after the Jan. 1 police call determined that the now-deceased man was in an altercation with another man at an apartment complex, and that at some point the second man used his vehicle as a weapon.

The second man was initially arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, though he was later released; his identity has not been disclosed by police. After the injured man died, the case was transferred to the SJPD homicide unit, which will present their findings to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office for evaluation of potential charges.

Additional details about the circumstances of the homicide were not immediately available Tuesday, but police said the two men knew each other and that the incident was not a chance encounter.

The first homicide of the year investigated by police also involved a man who died from injuries suffered on New Year’s Day. Leroy Benjamin, 62 was shot near West San Carlos Street and the Highway 87 overpass, and died Jan. 9; a shooting suspect has been arrested in that case.

Anyone with information for investigators can contact SJPD homicide Detective Sgt. Mike White at 4104@sanjoseca.gov or Detective Sgt. John Van Den Broeck at 3829@sanjoseca.gov, or call 408-277-5283. Tips can also be left with Silicon Valley Crime Stoppers at 408-947-7867 or at svcrimestoppers.org.

Te Bin Jung, 31, of San Jose, was arrested Jan. 10, and the next day he was charged with one count of sexual assault of a minor by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. Police said he was booked at the Main Jail then was granted supervised release.

San Jose police were contacted Jan. 9 after the mother of a high school student reported finding “inappropriate messages on her daughter’s phone from her former teacher,” according to a police news release.

Jung, identified as a current English teacher at Yerba Buena High School, was named as being the involved teacher. Police said the investigating officers determined that the alleged sexual contact between him and the teen girl occurred when he was teaching at Silver Creek High School.

Detectives with the police department’s child exploitation detail were brought into the investigation, and they obtained an arrest warrant for Jung, who was arrested at his home.

Police did not release additional details, and the county criminal clerk’s office was closed Monday in observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

But police did say detectives are exploring the possibility of more victims related to the investigation, “due to (Jung’s) position as a person of trust at the school.”

Court records show that Jung was arraigned Jan. 12, and that he is scheduled to return to court March 1. Messages left for Jung’s listed attorney and the school district were not immediately returned Monday.

Anyone with information for investigators can contact Detective Camarillo at 408-277-3214 or by email at 4576@sanjoseca.gov. Tips can also be left with Silicon Valley Crime Stoppers at 408-947-7867 or at svcrimestoppers.org.

One day after the victim died, San Jose police announced that they arrested a man suspected of shooting him.

The shooting was reported at 6:10 p.m. in the 400 block of West Carlos Street, near the Highway 87 overpass, according to San Jose police.

Responding officers found a man at the location suffering from at least one gunshot wound, and he was rushed to a hospital with life-threatening injuries. Police said he died Monday; on Wednesday the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office identified him as Leroy Benjamin, 62, of San Jose.

In a news release, police said a man was arrested Tuesday in San Jose on suspicion of committing the fatal shooting, but that “the motive and circumstances surrounding the incident are under investigation.” Sgt. Christian Camarillo, a police spokesman, told Bay Area News Group that the victim and suspect — who police have not publicly named — knew each other.

The first homicide investigated by San Jose police in 2022 did not occur until Feb. 8. The city recorded 35 homicides last year, with 20 of them the result of shootings, according to data compiled by this news organization.

Anyone with information about the Jan. 1 shooting can contact Detective Sgt. Ivan Barragan at 4106@sanjoseca.gov or Detective Elizabeth Ramirez at 4201@sanjoseca.gov or at 408-277-5283. Tips can also be left with Silicon Valley Crime Stoppers at 408-947-7867 or at svcrimestoppers.org.

Henry Bermudez was charged this week with rape and four additional rape- and assault-related counts indicating that the victim was intoxicated and unconscious during the reported attack.

Mountain View police stated in a news release that the woman reported being assaulted Saturday night after she became separated from her husband along Castro Street. While she was on her own, she told police that she was taken to an apartment in the 200 block of Castro, near Villa Street, where she was raped.

At some point the woman was able to leave, and she called her family by borrowing a phone from a good Samaritan. She reconnected with her family — who had reported her missing — and on Sunday morning, they flagged down a Mountain View patrol sergeant downtown and reported the sexual assault.

Police said the woman directed investigators to her attacker’s apartment, and after visiting the site they considered Bermudez as a suspect and learned he worked on the same block.

Officers arrested Bermudez at his workplace after the woman identified him as her attacker, police said. He was booked into the Elmwood men’s jail in Milpitas.

During Bermudez’s arraignment Wednesday at the Palo Alto Courthouse, Deputy District Attorney Lauren Ogata retold the woman’s account, which alleges that as she went in and out of unconsciousness, Bermudez repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted her as she begged him to stop.

Ogata added that after Bermudez was arrested, he reportedly admitted that “he knew the victim was extremely intoxicated.” The prosecutor called Bermudez a “threat to all vulnerable women” in arguing against his release from jail.

During the bail discussion, the reported victim’s husband spoke briefly to the court via video conference, saying his wife will “go into shock at random points during the day” and that “she knows she escaped, but is in fear that (Bermudez) will be released.”

Judge Brian Buckelew agreed with Ogata, citing public safety concerns in remanding Bermudez back to jail without bail. Bermudez’s next court appearance is scheduled for Feb. 7.

Police said the investigation is ongoing, and that detectives exploring the possibility of more potential victims linked to Bermudez. Anyone with information about the case can contact Detective Christine Powell at christine.powell@mountainview.gov.

John Arthur Getreu, 78, formally admitted Tuesday to killing 21-year-old Leslie Marie Perlov on Feb. 13, 1973. He entered the first-degree murder plea in Santa Clara County Superior Court via video conference; he is in state prison custody in Stockton, and his attorney said several medical conditions made it impossible to safely bring him to court.

Getreu also admitted Tuesday that his murder of Perlov was during an attempted rape. The body of Perlov, a Stanford graduate working at a local law library, was found face down underneath an oak tree, west of her car parked near a quarry off Old Page Mill Road.

Despite being on short list of suspects and a documented history of sexual assault and homicide, Getreu eluded charges until his November 2018 arrest at his Hayward home.

Authorities credited the then-rising forensic method of DNA genealogy, made famous by the solving of the Golden State Killer case that same year. On Tuesday, Getreu spoke briefly, to say “Guilty” to Judge Jessica Delgado in affirming his plea and to assure her that he understood his rights.

Diane Perlov spoke in court to describe the lasting impact her sister’s death had on her family.

“It has been 50 years this month since my older sister was taken from us. Fifty years in which this monster has been free and living his life,” Diane Perlov said. “I don’t know how many other people he has killed. Hopefully he will have to deal with that with his soul.”

She credited her sister’s struggle with Getreu for helping solve her own murder.

“It was only because she fought so desperately that she had the evidence underneath her fingernails,” Diane Perlov said. “It was an incredibly brutal murder and sexual assault.”

She added: “There is no peace for this, there is no resolution or peace or comfort. Justice is the least we can do.”

Deputy District Attorney Michel Amaral said the latest conviction was a “tribute to law enforcement’s use of science to find killers, and the family’s perseverance of seeking justice on behalf of their sister.”

“John Getreu committed these atrocious crimes nearly 50 years ago and he thought he had gotten away with it,” Amaral said. “But science caught up to him.”

Getreu was convicted in September 2021 in San Mateo County for the 1974 murder of 21-year-old Janet Ann Taylor, who was the daughter of Chuck Taylor, a former Stanford athletic director and coach. He was given a sentence of life in state prison and is being held at the California Health Care Facility, Stockton.

While his first conviction was on the Peninsula, the road to implicating Getreu in the two murders was paved in the South Bay, where the Santa Clara County sheriff’s office and district attorney’s office, which operates the county Crime Lab, revived the Perlov investigation about five years ago.

Leslie Perlov’s body was discovered Feb. 16, 1973 — three days after she is presumed to have been killed — and the crime scene showed she had been strangled with her underwear and pantyhose stuffed in her mouth and her skirt pulled up above her waist. But there was physical evidence underneath her fingernails that was preserved, with the hope that one day in the future it could be meaningfully processed.

Getreu has a sordid history that preceded and coincided with the two Stanford killings for which he was convicted. In 1964, when he was 18, Getreu was convicted of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl in Germany. Both Getreu and the girl were the children of Army officers stationed there; he was tried as a minor and returned to the United States after serving a short sentence.

He was working as a security guard in Palo Alto when Perlov and Taylor were killed, and in 1975, Getreu was convicted of raping an underage girl in the city. But DNA collection from felons was not standard practice at the time, so he was not tied to the Perlov and Taylor killings.

Fast forward to 2018, and Getreu was on a list of possible suspects identified by the new round of evidence analysis. Detectives conducted surveillance on him and surreptitiously obtained his DNA from a discarded item.

Authorities said it matched the sample that had been recovered from the original crime scene. After Getreu was arrested, he was linked to Taylor’s killing after San Mateo County sheriff’s investigators matched his DNA to samples taken from Taylor’s clothing.

Perlov and Taylor were among four young people connected to Stanford who were killed on or near the campus between 1973 and 1974. In a separate case, the same team of investigators tapped DNA genealogy to solve the murder of Arlis Perry, who was killed in 1974 at the Stanford Memorial Church. Stephen Blake Crawford, a campus security guard at the time, died by suicide in June 2018 as officers were approaching his San Jose apartment to arrest him.

The murder that remains unsolved is that of David Levine, a 19-year-old junior who was found stabbed to death outside Meyer Library in September 1973.

Getreu is scheduled for sentencing April 26 and again faces a lifetime prison sentence. Technically, he would be eligible for parole after about seven years because his crimes are subject to 1973 sentencing guidelines. But Amaral said he expects that the entirety of Getreu’s criminal history dating back to the Germany killing, and how he was free for decades after killing Perlov and Taylor, would dissuade a parole board from actually releasing him.

“What we have here is an actual serial killer,” Amaral said. “That should give the parole board enough to keep him in (prison) for the rest of his natural life.”

The shooting was reported around 7:30 a.m. Nov. 18 at a residence in the 10000 block of Dougherty Avenue, south of Palm Avenue. While homes there are closer to the unincorporated town of Coyote and have Morgan Hill addresses, San Jose’s boundaries are precisely drawn to include portions of Monterey Highway that give the city jurisdiction over the Coyote Creek Golf Course as well as access to the Anderson Reservoir.

Responding San Jose police officers found a man suffering from gunshot injuries; he was pronounced dead at the scene. He was later identified by the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office as Telesforo Rafael Partida Soberano, a 33-year-old Morgan Hill resident.

Police said an ensuing investigation formally identified 48-year-old San Jose resident Humberto Correa-Velasquez as a suspect in the homicide. Detectives obtained an arrest warrant for Correa-Velasquez and he was arrested Dec. 29 in Caldwell, Idaho — about 30 miles west of Boise — by the U.S. Marshals’ Pacific Southwest Regional Fugitive Task Force.

Other than confirming that the Correa-Velasquez and Partida Soberano knew each other, authorities have not detailed the relationship between the two men.

The Nov. 18 shooting marked the city’s 34th homicide of 2022 and was the second homicide investigated by San Jose police that day. A shooting that afternoon on River Oaks Parkway in North San Jose, which ended in the death of 54-year-old Armando Baltazar Gonzalez, was the city’s 35th and final homicide of the year.

Anyone with information about the shooting can contact the SJPD homicide Detective Sgt. Rafael Varela at 3638@sanjoseca.gov or Detective Jose Montoya at 3644@sanjoseca.gov, or call 408-277-5283. Tips can also be left with Silicon Valley Crime Stoppers at 408-947-7867 or at svcrimestoppers.org.

Raymond Joseph Calderon, 30, died after he was shot once each by Lt. Robert Lang and Officer Edward Carboni on the morning of June 22, 2022 at a home on Berndorf Drive in South San Jose, where he had gone in an attempt to evade police.

Calderon was wanted after he forced his grandmother and two young sons to ride with him as he drove her pickup truck to an East San Jose home. There, he shot his friend, 36-year-old Freddy Herrera, before driving to Modesto and fatally shooting 29-year-old Michelle Rose Gonzales, the mother of Calderon’s third son, a 6-month-old.

Backed in part by video footage from a police helicopter and the body cameras from multiple officers, Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Robert Baker concluded in a shooting report released Friday that the two officers were legally justified in shooting Calderon after he reportedly ran out of the Berndorf Drive home and pointed a handgun at Lang, who was with Carboni in the turret of an armored vehicle out front.

“Based on the facts of this case, Lieutenant Lang and Officer Carboni reasonably believed they needed to use deadly force against Raymond Calderon,” Baker wrote.

Baker’s report reveals previously undisclosed details about Calderon’s state of mind at the time. According to witness statements, Calderon was with his grandmother and two of his sons at a South San Jose community swimming pool on June 21 when the grandmother got a call from the boys’ mother asking for them to come home. That apparently agitated Calderon, who accused his grandmother of “setting him up,” and he voiced his belief that a man in a pool office was an undercover police officer.

At one point, the grandmother, whose identity was withheld in the report, recalled that Calderon said to her, “You brought this all on yourself.”

From there, Calderon made the family get in his grandmother’s Ford F-150 truck and drove to Herrera’s house on Mount Shasta Drive. On the way, he called the children’s mother to arrange a handoff of the boys. But the mother, who had a restraining order against Calderon, reportedly insisted that police be present.

The mother later told investigators of his response: “I knew you called the police … you aren’t getting your kids back, I’m going to (expletive) kill everybody … You (expletive) up, so now the kids are going to see some (expletive).”

At the Mount Shasta Drive home, the report states that Calderon spoke to Herrera, who then helped load a basket of Calderon’s belongings into the truck. Without warning, Calderon reportedly “pulled out a brownish-gold handgun and shot Herrera five times in the chest and back, killing him,” followed by him cursing at Herrera and yelling at his grandmother, “This is all your fault!”

Calderon then drove to his grandmother’s San Jose home, where he forced her to give him her bank card and retrieved a different weapon, a black handgun, from a storage shed. He made them ride with him to Modesto, during which he repeatedly hit his grandmother in the face with the first gun.

When they got to Gonzales’ home, the report states, she came out and walked up to the truck’s driver door and greeted Calderon, asking him, “What’s the matter?” Calderon abruptly shot Gonzales three times at close range, killing her.

Soon after, Modesto police contacted SJPD, who obtained emergency authorization to track his phone location. That tracking began at 11:37 p.m.; his phone reportedly showed he was driving south on Highway 101 toward San Jose. Within 10 minutes, an SJPD helicopter was following him as he drove toward his grandmother’s house.

According to the grandmother’s account, Calderon told her she was going to die and made her hold both of his sons in her lap, but then abruptly pulled over and told them to get out.

SJPD officers were closing in on his position, and he led them toward Berndorf Drive. He reached a dead end and got out of the truck with it still moving, leaving it to crash into a fence. He made his way to Berndorf, with a police officer chasing him on foot; Calderon reportedly fired two shots at the officer.

Calderon tried to force his way into one home, but the resident refused to let him in and ran to safety, prompting him to jump a fence into another yard, where he holed up in a shed for several hours. Neighboring homes were evacuated, and around 7:20 a.m. on June 22, after repeated loudspeaker announcements telling him to surrender, police deployed tear gas into the yard.

Calderon ran out of the front of the home with a gun in his right hand, the report states. Lang told investigators he had “no doubt” his life was in danger, and he and Carboni fired almost simultaneously, Lang from his sniper rifle and Carboni with his carbine.

The June shooting was SJPD’s third and final police shooting of 2022, and the second such incident that led to a person’s death. It also marked the third fatal police shooting involving Carboni.

In May 2019 he was one of three officers who fatally shot 24-year-old Efren Esquivel, who had been sought for a car theft and was dragging his sergeant with the stolen vehicle. That same year, on Oct. 31, Carboni fatally shot 33-year-old Francis Calonge, who was carrying what turned out to be a replica handgun when he walked toward Independence High School on Jackson Avenue. Carboni was trailing from about 120 feet away when he opened fire after giving several orders to Calonge to drop his weapon.

Donnovan Dawkins, 29, was arrested Dec. 30 in Frederick, Maryland by local police on suspicion of crimes involving sex trafficking, according to San Jose police.

His arrest caps a months-long criminal investigation by the Santa Clara County Law Enforcement Investigating Human Trafficking task force, which in the case of Dawkins involved an undercover police officer posting a profile of a teen girl on social-media forums known for sex trafficking communications.

The case also coincided with the start of Human Trafficking Prevention Month as designated by President Biden, and the launch of an expanded county public outreach campaign led by the Valley Transportation Authority and backed by a coalition that includes the district attorney’s office, board of supervisors, and San Jose State University.

VTA Chief Executive Carolyn Gonot announced Friday that messaging on buses, light-rail trains, bus shelters and other facilities will be emblazoned with literature and slogans emphasizing how transit is a key place where kidnapping and trafficking can be detected and reported. She also highlighted the agency’s VTAlerts mobile phone app as a discreet way to flag potential exploitation to authorities.

A 2018 state law authored by San Jose-based state Assemblymember Ash Kalra mandated training for transit workers to identify signs of human trafficking, including when minors who don’t make eye contact or are actively prevented from communicating with transit operators by an adult accompanying them.

Ruth Silver Taube, a Santa Clara University law professor who serves as legal services chair for the South Bay Coalition to End Human Trafficking and is a delegate to the county Human Trafficking Commission, designed the VTA’s training and called its commitment “nothing short of groundbreaking,” holding VTA up as a statewide leader in the field.

According to investigators, Dawkins contacted the user believing their profile was that of a 16-year-old girl from San Jose. Throughout their ensuing correspondence, Dawkins was repeatedly made aware that the user was underage, authorities said.

Through “extensive conversations with an undercover officer, the suspect solicited the female for commercial sex trafficking,” San Jose police said in a statement.

Dawkins allegedly pressed on and arranged to purchase an airline ticket for the user to fly to Baltimore and meet him. When the user cited her purported age again to tell him why she couldn’t fly to him, he reportedly gave her specific travel directions to avoid suspicion and detection.

Deputy District Attorney Patrick Vanier, who worked with the task force, said the undercover investigation was part of a response to an increase in online commercial sex trafficking targeting the South Bay.

“Traffickers and pimps see San Jose and Santa Clara County as a place to market the victims they’re exploiting,” Vanier said. “We’re doing a host of proactive investigations to identify these exploiters, root them out, and hold them accountable.”

The investigation of Dawkins resulted in an arrest warrant obtained Dec. 23, and a week later he was taken into police custody at a home in Frederick, Maryland. The arrest was coordinated among an array of agencies, including SJPD human trafficking detectives, the Prince George’s County (Maryland) Human Trafficking Task Force, and the State’s Attorney’s Office for Prince George’s County, where Dawkins lives.

In addition to anticipated charges in Santa Clara County, Vanier said Dawkins could face separate drug and weapons charges in Maryland based on what authorities recovered after serving related search warrants.

Anyone with information about suspected human trafficking can contact the SJPD Human Trafficking Task Force at 408-537-1999 and stopslavery@sanjoseca.gov, or the Santa Clara County task force at 408-792-2700 and HTTips@dao.sccgov.org. Tips can also be left with Silicon Valley Crime Stoppers at 408-947-7867 or at svcrimestoppers.org.

Utility crews raced to restore power to large chunks of the Bay Area as officials in the region’s urban centers reported hundreds of downed trees and numerous washed-out roads from the latest powerful atmospheric river to roar ashore this week. To the west — most notably in Capitola and Rio del Mar along the Santa Cruz coast — one of the largest storm surges in recent memory caused significant damage to waterfront businesses and tourist attractions.

The damage assessments came as meteorologists warned of more rain in the forecast over the next several days, with a parade of storms marching across the Pacific Ocean toward Northern California promising to further inundate the Bay Area this weekend and early next week.

“Be ready for more heavy rainfall with high probability of flooding, especially as we go into early next week,” said Rick Canepa, a National Weather Service meteorologist. “Just be prepared, try to do as much storm prep as you can. I know it’s a bit relentless.”

Unlike previous systems to hit the region over the last couple of weeks, the storm that hit Wednesday and Thursday brought punishing winds that gusted to 101 mph in central Marin County on Wednesday evening. In Oakland and San Francisco, the wind gusts of about 60 mph tore through each city — dislodging drought-weakened trees into power lines and onto roadways.

Across the state, some 440,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers lost power during the storm, the utility provider announced. By Thursday afternoon, 115,000 people remained in the dark, a figure that was expected to drop to 75,000 by the end of the day. In the Bay Area, more than 66,000 people remained without power at 2 p.m. Thursday, including about 24,000 people in the North Bay and 17,000 people in the Peninsula. Another 15,000 people remained in the dark in the East Bay, while nearly 8,000 people were left without power in the South Bay. About 2,200 people were without power in San Francisco.

Authorities in the North Bay blamed the storm for two fatalities, one of them a toddler. The 2-year-old boy, who has not been identified, died in the Sonoma County town of Occidental on Wednesday night after a tree fell into a mobile home, Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Juan Valencia said Thursday.

The boy was sitting on the couch in the living room at about 5:15 a.m. when he was crushed, Valencia said. Fire paramedics tried to revive the child with CPR and other live-saving efforts, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

A 19-year-old woman also died Wednesday morning when her vehicle hydroplaned on a standing patch of water and slammed into a pole in Fairfield, local authorities said.

The potent system was fueled by a “bomb cyclone” — a swirling area of intense low pressure that churned in the Pacific before slamming into the West Coast, sending a swell of moisture into California that was accompanied by dangerously strong winds.

The storm dropped 4 to 6 inches of rain in the Santa Cruz Mountains and 1 to 2 inches across much of the rest of the Bay Area, including San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco.

Across the Peninsula, the East Bay and the South Bay, local emergency response officials voiced relief that their most dire fears about the storm failed to materialize. Even so, they raced to make repairs ahead of the next deluge.

“Overall, we’ve fared pretty well,” said Leslie Arroyo, a spokesperson for the City of South San Francisco, after the community largely endured only downed trees and a toppled gas station canopy. “We’re pleased with how things have been very minimal.”

In East Palo Alto, workers drained water from the large subterranean garage at the 160-unit Woodland Park Apartments, where cars flooded up to their wheel wells Saturday. Shoveling deep mud from an adjacent sidewalk, one worker, who asked not to be identified, said that “it’s a lot of work — it’s extensive.”

Almost 300 trees fell in San Francisco over a 24-hour period ending at 6 a.m. Thursday, according to Department of Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon. In the West Portal neighborhood, one of those trees knocked down 500 feet of bus lines, forcing riders to be rerouted while crews worked to restore service.

In East Oakland, a roughly 40-foot section of a eucalyptus tree fell on a two-story, eight-unit apartment complex Wednesday evening at the end of Lynde Street, along Peralta Creek. The hole allowed rain to pour in and flood the homes, forcing the complex to be evacuated.

As daylight broke Thursday, Victoria James marveled at how her family narrowly avoided tragedy. A 10-year resident of the building, James recalled being with six other members of her family in their second-floor unit when they felt a strong shaking and saw the lights go out.

“We thought it was a 6.9 earthquake,” said James, 39, after getting her first daylight look at the damage. “We had to leave right away because the tree was going to block the door. We left with what was on our backs.”

James, like several of her other neighbors, had moved to a local hotel with hotel with her family — and she shuddered at how they narrowly avoided tragedy.

“These trees should have been cut down a long time ago,” James said. She and another decade-long resident, Patty Bigornia, voiced concerns that local officials did not do enough to mitigate the tree risk, despite residents having raised concerns about it in the past.

“I’m just glad nobody was hurt,” said Bigornia, 54. “But this was 100% preventable.”

Several roads remained washed out or closed due to debris Thursday, including nearly a dozen in Santa Clara County.

The next round of rain should arrive late Friday evening, dropping light to moderate rain through the weekend, said Canepa. A second, more powerful atmospheric river should arrive late Sunday night — bringing even more potential for flooding to the waterlogged Bay Area.

“Everything is saturated. The soils can’t really handle hardly any more,” Canepa said.

Lisa Krieger and Gabriel Greschler contributed to this report.