By STEFANIE DAZIO and CHRISTOPHER WEBER (Associated Press)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A woman who authorities say fatally stabbed her partner at their Los Angeles apartment Monday then threw her two children from a moving SUV onto the freeway, killing her infant daughter, was an astrologer who called the impending solar eclipse “the epitome of spiritual warfare” in an online post days earlier.

Los Angeles police believe Danielle Cherakiyah Johnson, 34, posted on X as an astrology influencer and recording artist with the moniker “ Ayoka,” in the days leading up to the violence, which began hours before the eclipse peaked in Southern California, said Lt. Guy Golan.

While detectives have reviewed Johnson’s posts, police are not considering the eclipse to be a precipitating or contributing factor to the slayings “because we just don’t know why she did what she did,” Golan told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

“We’ve taken all the facts we can, but without being able to interview her and without having something more tangible than a post on X, I don’t know how much weight you can give to somebody (saying) there’s an apocalypse and attribute it to one of the most horrific murders we’ve had in LA,” Golan, who is head of the homicide unit investigating the case, said.

Authorities say Johnson and her partner, 29-year-old Jaelen Allen Chaney, had an argument around 3:40 a.m. Monday in their apartment in Woodland Hills, about 25 miles (42 km) northwest of downtown LA. Johnson stabbed Chaney and fled with her kids, an 8-month-old girl and her 9-year-old sister, in a Porsche Cayenne.

Johnson then drove along Interstate 405 in Culver City and threw her daughters out of the moving SUV around 4:30 a.m., police said. The baby was pronounced dead on the road, but the older daughter — who witnessed the stabbing — survived with moderate injuries.

Johnson traveled southwest to Redondo Beach, where a half-hour later she was driving over 100 miles per hour (160 kph) and crashed into a tree. The LAPD is investigating whether the solo crash was an apparent suicide.

The Los Angeles Times first reported on Johnson’s social media activities in connection with the killings.

“Get your protection on and your heart in the right place,” she posted April 4 to more than 105,000 followers on X. “The world is very obviously changing right now and if you ever needed to pick a side, the time to do right in your life is now. Stay strong you got this.”

On April 5, she posted in all caps, “Wake up wake up the apocalypse is here. Everyone who has ears listen. Your time to choose what you believe is now.”

Her social media also included a mix of antisemitic screeds, conspiracy theories about vaccines and warnings about the end of the world alongside astrological predictions and positive affirmations. Also on April 5, she posted the word “LOVE” dozens of times. Her personal website offers a variety of services including “zodiac healing work,” “alcohol balancing system” and an “aura cleanse.”

Johnson’s internet presence and online following dates back years. The Fader, a music magazine, interviewed her in 2016 as an astrology personality.

Golan said there were no calls for police to respond to the couple’s apartment prior to Monday’s killing, when neighbors called 911 after seeing the door open. Johnson did not have a felony criminal record in California and there were no indications of reported domestic violence.

Detectives did not immediately link the Woodland Hills slaying to the daughters, Golan said. He was in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood when he started getting push alerts from news organizations on his cellphone about the infant’s death on the roadway in Culver City. Investigators realized there might be a connection between two missing children from the family’s apartment and the tragedy on the interstate.

“I was like ‘Oh, there’s two young girls who were stranded on the 405 Freeway.’ That is such a random and terrible thing to hear about. And we knew there were two young children,” Golan continued. “We were setting up an Amber Alert.”

Golan said detectives discovered candles and cards inside the apartment, but he was not sure whether they were tarot cards.

“They didn’t look like your standard deck of cards that you would play poker with,” he said.

The solar eclipse’s path of totality stretched from Mazatlán, Mexico, to Newfoundland, Canada, a swath approximately 115 miles (185 kilometers) wide. Revelers were engulfed in darkness at state parks, on city rooftops and in small towns when the moon blocked out the sun, though Southern California only saw a partial eclipse that peaked at 11:12 a.m.

Across the globe, the celestial event spawned fears of the apocalypse and other suspicions rooted in religion and spirituality. But Golan noted that others who posted online about their eclipse-related worries did not commit violence like Johnson.

“How many people wrote about it,” he said, “and didn’t go out and murder somebody?”

When the team bus pulls up outside the Frozen Four’s host arena – whether it is Tampa or Boston or Buffalo or wherever — and the players traipse down a red carpet, thronged by screaming fans, Kelly McGrath always feels a little sense of parenthood.

“That came out of this building in 2011. It was our idea, and now they do it everywhere, it’s just a normal part of the Frozen Four,” said McGrath, Xcel Energy Center’s general manager and executive director. “We like to remind them that it was a St. Paul idea, and the guys just feel like rock stars coming in.”

On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the ‘X’ will host college hockey’s biggest show for the fourth time, and McGrath is working alongside the University of Minnesota and Visit St. Paul to ensure that the red carpet is rolled out. That is not just for the four teams coming to the arena, but for throngs of fans from Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan and all across the hockey-loving world.

Before the opening faceoffs on Thursday, when Denver faces Boston University and then Michigan plays Boston College, myriad preparations will take place inside the building, while coaches and players spend hours watching video to determine their best strategies once the puck is dropped.

At the X, after hosting more than 40 NHL games each year, along with welcoming more than 100,000 prep hockey fans to downtown St. Paul each February and March for the girls and boys state tournaments, there are no worries about what will happen on the ice sheet.

“We do hockey,” McGrath said. “That’s our strength and our bread and butter, so when an event like the Frozen Four chooses Minnesota and Xcel Energy Center, I don’t worry about the hockey. Three games, we know how to do that pretty well.”

The next job is to make sure St. Paul and the arena are clean, safe and welcoming for those making the trip to the Twin Cities, whether it is for their first trip or their 100th to the X. Organizers from Minnesota have traveled to recent tournaments — hockey and other college sports — in other cities to see what they do in New York or Florida or elsewhere and if there are ideas to be borrowed to make for a better experience.

“We’re going to have equipment trucks ready for the teams at the airport so they don’t have to play that Tetris game under the bus to fit everything,” said Tom McGinnis, an assistant athletic director at the U of M and a former chair of the NCAA Men’s Ice Hockey Committee. “In 2018 we were the first place to have student-athlete lounges at the hotels. You spend five days here either in the locker room or in the hotel room, so we’re trying to expand the student-athlete lounge at the hotel, so they have a different places where they can go play video games or do other things and have a different place to hang out rather than just watching Netflix in their rooms.”

So fans don’t just sit in their hotel rooms, they will again offer Frozen Fest, which is a gathering spot at the RiverCentre, adjacent to the arena, with games, food, drinks and giveaways. RiverCentre will also host the Friday evening awards, culminating with the awarding of the 2024 Hobey Baker award.

This will be the seventh time the Frozen Four has come to St. Paul, and just the second time that there will not be a team from Minnesota among the quartet that advanced out of the regional round. The since-demolished St. Paul Civic Center hosted the tournament in 1989, 1991 and 1994. The three previous tournaments at the X have concluded with an in-state team — Minnesota in 2002, Minnesota Duluth in 2011 and 2018 — cutting up the nets after the title game. Organizers admit it will be unique this time around, without a team from this state, or even this time zone, participating.

McGrath said the crowd will be different as a result, with many locals coming to watch college hockey’s top teams regardless of where they’re from, and many fans from other parts of the country coming here, in a kind of photo negative of two years ago, when Minnesota and Minnesota State Mankato faced off in the Frozen Four opening round in Boston. She added that the demand for tickets is still significant, with many available on the secondary market.

“It’s still a destination event for college hockey fans, so the NCAA put their tickets on sale and previous buyers got the first crack,” McGrath said. “The tickets were mostly sold by about the first of the year. There’s always the ticket exchange where people can buy and sell, but for all intents and purposes, we’ve moved the tickets.”

The 2025 tournament will be held in St. Louis and the 2026 Frozen Four will head to Las Vegas for the first time. Beyond that the schedule is not set, but there is a likelihood that based on past success, we will be back in St. Paul again before too long.

“We’ll continue to bid on hosting this event,” McGinnis said. “It’s got a great history and tradition of being here in St. Paul and in Minnesota, and we’ll want to continue to do everything we can to keep bringing it back here.”

As this year’s presidential election gathers steam, there’s going to be a lot of emphasis on getting young people to vote. Since 2020, about 16 million young people have come of voting age, so you can bet that the presidential candidates will make their pitches to motivate these young Americans. And organizations like Rock the Vote will try to engage young voters as well.

But, as Americans, we are more than voters. We are also economic agents who must work and manage our economic lives. That can be a challenge for many young people to learn, and unfortunately few political leaders encourage young Americans to learn about economics or become financially literate.

Yet so many political decisions have an economic component. Economically informed citizens are better equipped to make good decisions, both in their personal lives and when voting or participating in civic life. When citizens understand the consequences of their financial choices, they can make more informed decisions at the ballot box.

I have sometimes wished that when I was younger I had been taught greater financial literacy. In particular, I would have benefited from lessons like, “If you purchase a house as soon as possible, you won’t waste years of your money paying rent, but instead you will save up equity for later use.”

And “If you put your money in the stock market and leave it there for five to 10 years, you’re almost guaranteed to make money, given the historical record.” Or how about: “For every year you wait before you take your Social Security, you will increase your monthly benefit by about 8 percent, which amounts to 70 percent more if you wait until you’re 70 compared to if you start taking Social Security early at 62.”

The first two I did not learn until much later in life; when it comes to the third one, I’m always amazed at the number of friends and associates who are approaching retirement years and don’t know that waiting to start your Social Security payments is (often) a good thing to do, if you can afford it.

What I have learned is that being financially literate at any age gives an individual the resources they need for greater security. And the sooner you know, the better it will go. Conversely, without financial literacy you can get yourself into a heck of a lot of trouble, including debt, bad credit, or even housing foreclosure and bankruptcy.

In 2022, 270,000 homeowners, or about 8 percent of mortgage-financed home buyers, were underwater on their mortgages, meaning they owed more on their property than it’s worth. In 2009, during the nationwide economic collapse sparked by a home mortgage crisis, nearly a quarter of the nation’s homes were underwater.

The film “The Big Short” showed how banks were handing out loans like candy, including memorable cases of mortgage lenders providing “NINJA loans” (“no income, no job, no assets”) to applicants, including an exotic dancer who owned five houses and a condo with adjustable rate mortgage loans on each.

When should you take on a huge financial commitment like buying a house? What are the pros and cons of investing in other commodities, whether the stock market, gold or the latest financial fad, bitcoin? The media trumpets stories about fortunes being made and a person can feel like they are missing the gold rush. And then later the media downplays the tragedies of those who made the wrong investments and lost everything.

Consequently, many young people never learn the basic financial skills needed to prosper in life, and in some ways it is understandable. Compared to making a bitcoin fortune or becoming a TikTok influencer, learning about economic and financial basics when you are 17, 18, 20 years old seems boring.

Fortunately more people are realizing the importance of education around financial literacy, especially for young people. Increasingly it’s recognized that economic education can equip young adults with essential knowledge about how the economy functions, including concepts like supply and demand, inflation, wages and fiscal policy.

Currently 35 states require high school students to take a course in personal finance to graduate, and 28 states require students to take a course in economics. The only states that have no requirement include Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Vermont and Washington

Arizona enacted legislation to establish a State Seal of Personal Finance Proficiency to recognize public school graduates who have attained a high level of proficiency in personal finance.

Organizations like the Council for Economic Education have been advocating for public policy that instills in high school students the fourth “R” — a real world understanding of economics and personal finance. Its FinEd50 initiative advances policy changes at the state level and reports a 12-state increase since 2022 in states passing personal finance requirements. That translates into an additional 10 million high school students who will be able to learn financial literacy.

Full participation in our representative democracy requires a measure of understanding of our economic lives. I wished I had learned that many years ago. Fortunately more young people are now gaining knowledge of that very practical information. The United States is better off when more of its residents have high levels of financial literacy.

Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. He wrote this column for The Fulcrum.

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