My name is Andy Stavros. I'm not a scientist, a doctor, or an activist. I'm a father in Newport Beach.
Before anything else, my heart goes out to every child, every parent, and every family affected by the reported pediatric cancer cases in Ladera Ranch, including the reported cases of Ewing sarcoma. You have been in my thoughts throughout this entire investigation, and as a father myself, I cannot imagine what you have carried.
Like a lot of parents, my kids are always outside. At parks, on fields, on trails, all over Orange County. And like most parents, I assumed those places are cared for in similar ways, with similar landscaping, fertilizers, and pesticides. So when I first heard about the reported cases in Ladera Ranch, my first thought was not that it had to be pesticides. It was the opposite. If the same kinds of products are used all across the county, why would one community be different? Why Ladera, and not Newport Beach, or Irvine, or Mission Viejo? That question would not let me go, and when something doesn't make sense to me, I have a hard time putting it down until I understand it.
I'll be honest that I was nervous about releasing any of this, because information like this has ripple effects, and families worry. But I kept asking myself a simple question. If these were the parks where my own kids played, would I want someone to look? For me the answer was yes. Not to prove a theory. Not to accuse anyone. Simply to ask whether we have looked at everything.
The more I looked, the more I realized this was bigger than Ladera Ranch, and bigger than me. By trade I'm a real estate agent, which is really a job about reading land: its history, its records, and the paper trail of what a piece of ground used to be. I paired that habit with something new. I used modern AI, not to generate answers, but to organize enormous amounts of public information, search historical archives and metadata, and surface records that would be almost impossible for one person to assemble alone. Then I verified everything by hand. Almost none of it was hidden. It had been public for decades. The pieces had simply never been assembled into one investigation.
What I found was not really a story about pesticides. It was a story about the land itself. Long before the homes and the schools, the ground beneath Ladera Ranch was cattle country, part of the historic O'Neill Ranch and what became Rancho Mission Viejo. In 1907, as California fought the Texas fever tick, the government placed Orange County under quarantine and required ranchers to dip their cattle in arsenic. The formula, the vat blueprints, and the poison warnings were all documented by the government. What I could not find was any record of where those vats were actually built. Arsenic is an element. It does not break down. So if a vat operated somewhere, its arsenic is, in principle, still in the ground.
There is one distinction I want every reader to understand, because it decides so much. There are two different kinds of arsenic in this story. Lead arsenate was an orchard pesticide, and it leaves arsenic bound together with lead. Arsenic trioxide was the cattle-dip poison, and it leaves arsenic with little or no lead. Where California has tested local soil, including at some school sites built on former orchards, it was looking for the pesticide. As far as I could find, no test in these communities has ever looked for the dipping signature. The schools, the parks, and the homes built on the old ranch land were never checked for it.
I want to be very clear about what this is and is not. None of this establishes contamination, exposure, or that anything caused anyone's illness. This report does not conclude that arsenic caused Ewing sarcoma, and the published science I reviewed does not link arsenic to that particular cancer. I say so plainly, and I have kept the evidence that cuts against my own questions inside the report, because a real investigation preserves what challenges it, not only what supports it. This report does not accuse any developer, agency, school, or landowner of wrongdoing, and other explanations, including pesticides, remain firmly on the table. My only agenda is the truth, and the safety of our communities.
I've taken this as far as one person with good tools and a lot of long nights can take it. The next steps, pulling the physical ranch archives and putting real soil testing behind the questions the paper record cannot close, belong to people and institutions with more reach than I have. I would be genuinely glad to help. I have published every source, map, overlay, document, and photograph behind this report, not so anyone will simply take my word for it, but so people can read it, challenge it, verify it, and improve it.
If this investigation taught me anything, it is that history doesn't disappear. Sometimes it just waits for someone to connect the pieces. This is my attempt to do that, and I hope you'll read it for yourself.
If you're a researcher, an agency, a journalist, a physician, or just another parent who knows something I don't, I would like to hear from you.
Contact: I would genuinely rather hear from you than not. Please use the contact form on the project website. Every message reaches me directly.
Andy Stavros, Newport Beach, California